Extravagant Beholding

Steven P. Hopkins

E X T R AVAGA N T B EHOL DI NG : LOV E , I DE A L B ODI E S , A N D PA RTIC U LA R I T Y

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2007 by The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved.0018-2710/2007/4701-0001$10.00

i. introduction: dilemmas of desire

In the recent documentary film by Amy Kofman and Kirby Dick onJacques Derrida, there is a strange and rather humorous exchange withDerrida on the subject of “love” (

l’amour

), after the philosopher and thefilmmaker/interviewer clear up a confusion about the exact topic at hand,at first mistakenly taken as “death” (

la mort

).

1

The pun in French here,due to mispronunciation, like the Derridean “

différance

,” is telling. It’s a

1

See

Derrida

, directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Kofman, 84 minutes, English, French(United States: Jane Doe Films, 2002). The pun is of course obvious and predictable, and itis everywhere present in European literature. It makes one of its most memorable and funnyappearances in a German book, in Thomas Mann’s

The Magic Mountain

, where the novel’shero speaks passionately (in French, of course) about “the body, love, and death” as simply“one and the same” (

le corps

,

l’amour

,

la mort

,

ces trois ne font qu’un

) to his erstwhile,indifferent beloved Clavdia Chauchat (“hotcat”) in a parody of Goethe’s Faustian WalpurgisNacht. See Thomas Mann,

The Magic Mountain

, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Everyman’sLibrary, 1995), 406–7. The punning is of course lost in the Woods translation, which rendersthe French of the original German text into English. For the French original, see the earlierclassic (and sometimes confusing) English translation of H. T. Lowe-Porter or the originalGerman text (1924; Berlin: Fischer, 1965), 314–15.

Any comparative study such as this assumes a long list of colleagues who have helped toclarify arguments and refine comparisons across several traditions and languages. I am in-debted, over a period of many years, to Moshe Idel, Charles Hallisey, John Strong, NathanielDeutsch, Michael Sells, Barbara Holdrege, Vasudha Narayanan, Yudit Kornberg Greenberg,Indira Peterson, and Scott Kugle for their support, suggestions, and encouragement along theway. I am also grateful to Elizabeth Pérez and Stephanie Frank, editorial assistants for

Historyof Religions

, to the anonymous readers for the journal, and particularly to Daniel Boyarin,the outside reader, for his close and generous reading of the manuscript.

Extravagant Beholding

2

bad joke, but, as always with Derrida, it’s something more than a joke. Atfirst saying that he is incapable of “generalities about love,” that he has an“empty head” about it, Derrida poses a series of suggestive insights, someof which will guide our study of this vexed but crucial topic in religionand literature through the particularly vivid poetic motif of loving bodilydescription.

love: the who and the what

Derrida inquires about “love” since Plato: Is this love the love ofsomeone or the love of something (

quelqu’un

,

quelque chose

)? Does onelove someone for the absolute singularity of what they are, or does one lovethe qualities (the beauty, youth, intelligence, excellence) of that person,the “way that person is”? Does one love someone or does one love some-thing about someone? At the heart of love, Derrida remarks, there is adifference between “the who and the what” (

le qui et le quoi

), a differencethat “separates the heart.” Love dies, he says, when the beloved falls shortof the “idea” or “ideals” held by the lover: the other person, after all, isnot like “this or that.” That is, he summarizes, “the history of love, theheart of love, is divided between the who and the what.” To love is to betrue to someone, irreducibly, concretely—but love will ultimately die inthat singular individual’s inability to “be” the “what.” Love, ultimately,is about potentially unrealizable ideals, beautiful ideas, Truth and Beautybeyond individual objects of love. One might also think, in another con-text, of the savage prose poem of Baudelaire in

The Spleen of Paris

,“Laquelle est la vraie?” where, after the death of “a certain” Benedicta“who filled the atmosphere with the ideal,” a miraculous girl who was“too beautiful to live long,” the narrator is tormented by “a little personwho bore a singular resemblance” to the miraculous but dead beloved, andwho, as she tramples the still-loose and damp earth of the grave site “withan hysterical and bizarre violence,” cackles with laughter and says: “It’sme, the true Benedicta! It’s me, a famous lousy bitch! And to punish yourfoolishness and your blindness you shall love me as I am!” In despair,the narrator, one leg sinking into the damp ground, like a wolf caught ina trap, ends up literally with one foot in the “grave of the ideal.”

2

Love, eros,

l’amour

here, is corrosive and deeply ambivalent; far fromsimple union or loving presence, it speaks to us of unattainability (of theideal) and dissatisfaction, a constant stretching forth; its goals are neithersimple nor univocal. Love here is division, fissure, fracture, duality, vulner-ability, and a horizontal asymmetry. To be in love is to become a victim

2

Le spleen de Paris

38 in

Baudelaire: Oeuvres complètes

, vol. 1, texte établi, présenté, etannoté par Claude Pichois (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1975), 342.

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3

of ideals, in Baudelaire’s image, in the end, to be stuck in the mud, tohave one foot in the grave of one’s own ideal.

love’s rising stairs and flickering lightning

Derrida’s remarks and Baudelaire’s prose poem allude to tensions in thetheory and practice of love that indeed have deep roots in early Greek lit-eratures, in Plato’s dialogues, particularly the

Symposium

and

Phaedrus

,and in the discourses of the later Stoa. Eros is “sweetbitter” (

klukupikron

),as Sappho would say; and to Pausanius in Plato’s

Symposium

eros is a

poikilos nomos

, a law that is “dappled,” “spangled,” “devious,” “abstruse,”“subtle,” of scintillating, destabilizing ambivalence.

3

Greek sources speakabout both division and idealized unity, of love’s ambivalent and necessarypowers.

Socrates’ famous speech in the

Symposium

summarizing the doctrineof eros attributed to the Mantinean wise woman Diotima would seem tosuccessfully domesticate the native unruliness of eros. There Socrates-Diotima charts an ordered, stepwise, goal-focused “ascent of eros,” fromearthly to heavenly forms of love, from love of the individual person, theindividual body, the “who” of Derrida—a love vulnerable to pain andattachment, to need and desire—to love of his/her qualities, love of beau-tiful objects or ideas (

logous kalous

[210A]), the “what,” and finally,beyond, to a great sea of beauty and truth, a transcendental state thatstrips away all that is merely human in love (210A–211C). There is nolonger a particular boy, a particular lovely body, but one is grounded inloveliness itself, “the Beautiful itself, absolute, pure, unmixed, not pollutedby human flesh or colors or any other great nonsense of mortality.”

4

Oneis safe from Baudelaire’s “little” earthly Benedicta, the messy, and thefoul. This is the “orthodox” love (we note as we read the repeated use of

orthos

in the text), a love that always leads, in an orderly manner, thelover upward “for the sake of Beauty, starting out from beautiful things”(the particular body of a particular beloved) and “using them like risingstairs” (

h

o

sper epanabasmois chr

o

menon

[211C]). But as Martha Nuss-baum has shown quite powerfully in her studies of the

Symposium

and

Phaedrus

, this is hardly Plato’s final word on eros. After the Diotimaspeech, Alcibiades, Socrates’ young errant lover, bursts into the drinking

3

See Anne Carson,

Eros the Bittersweet

(Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2003), 3,23–24.

4

“

ei t

o

genoito auto to kalon idein

eilikrives, katharon, amikton, alla m

e

anaple

o

n sark

o

nte anthr

o

pin

o

n kai

chr

o

mat

o

n kai all

e

s poll

e

s phlurias

. . . [And the phrase goes on]

all’auto to

theion kalon dunaito monoeides katidein

[but if he could see the divine Beauty itselfin its one form?]” For the translation, see Plato,

Symposium

, trans. Alexander Nehmas andPaul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), 57–59. For the Greek text, I am using JohnBurnett’s

Platonis Opera

, vol. 2 (1901; Oxford, 1986).

Extravagant Beholding

4

party and systematically answers back every point made by Socrates in hisspeech: he argues vulnerability and instability, what Nussbaum describesas “the flickering lightning of the open and unstably moving body,”

5

toSocrates’ impassibility, his stony transcendence; he argues vivid par-ticular material images (

eid

o

la

of the Silenus statues [215B]) and con-crete material beauty to Socrates’ shimmering invisible “true virtue” (

dearet

e

n al

e

th

e

[212A]); passions to irony, tormenting closeness to Socrates’remote round gleaming; warmth to the cold impassible body; lack to surepossession; “suddenness” (Nussbaum comments much on the uses of theword

exaiphn

e

s

throughout the dialogue) to Socrates’ studied intellectualtrances.

Plato reveals eros at the end of the

Symposium in all its dividedness.On the one hand, we have the view of love as potentially ennobling, asa process of ascent that transcends its roots in the love of an individualperson, an individual body in its sexual particularity, to any beautiful body,to beautiful ideas, and to beauty and virtue itself. The “who” is tran-scended, and the “what” of love internalized and made perfect in a self-possessed state of virtue. On the other hand, Plato makes very powerfuland concrete the argument about particularity, of love that ruins, rendersvulnerable, and courts insanity, love that makes one a slave, love that isirreducibly about another person, the other who is impossible to encom-pass, transcend, turn into a universal idea, love and its disorder, its excess,its instability, its failure. As Socrates says of his fatal lover: “I shudder athis madness and passion for love” (213D).

Nussbaum argues that this dilemma, this tension at the heart of eros, isresolved by Plato in the Phaedrus—particularly in Socrates’ “recantation”speech and defense of mania, love’s crazy vulnerability to the particularand to madness—in the “good life.”6 Socrates has just listened to Phaedrusread to him a learned discourse on love by a certain “Lysias,” whomPhaedrus deeply admires, where the author recommends that the youngman avoid accepting the service of one who loves him and seek out theone “who does not love.” After criticizing Lysias for his disingenuous-ness and arbitrariness, his lack of clear structure, and for his mere rhe-torical treatment of this important theme, Socrates responds, his headcovered, with a speech that faults love for its powerful jealousies and itslovers whose loves ultimately do more harm than good to their belovedboys, in mind, body, possessions, family, and friends. But after crossingthe river, Socrates feels he has made offence; a daimonion, a “familiar

5 “The Speech of Alcibiades,” in her The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in GreekTragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 198.

6 See Martha Nussbaum, “ ‘This Story Isn’t True’: Madness, Reason, and Recantation inthe Phaedrus,” in her The Fragility of Goodness, 200–233.

One Line Long

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divine sign,” comes to him like a voice on the air, and he recants his pre-vious condemnation of eros and proceeds to formulate quite another kindof approach, one that neither condemns eros nor subsumes it, as in his“Diotima” speech in the Symposium, into some “higher” experiencebeyond the passions. This speech will defend eros and its mania un-diluted as being at the very heart of the life of virtue. What is implied inthis shift is that eros in its “ascent” ceases altogether to be eros as it givesup the particular (other person). The ladder of love is hardly a satisfac-tory answer to the real dilemmas of desire. Real eros—the particularityof its needs, its passions and interests and limits and vulnerability—criticalto human flourishing (eudaimonia), demands that we descend the stairs,encounter again the world of concrete risk, of luck, to truly love, and ulti-mately to truly embark on the adventure of eudaimonia. In Nussbaum’ssummary:

Unlike the life of the ascending person in the Symposium, this best human lifeis unstable, always prey to conflict. The lovers have continually to struggle againstinappropriate inclinations, to expend psychic effort in order to hit on what isappropriate. Unlike the ascending person, again, they risk, in the exclusivity oftheir attachment to a mutable object, the deep grief of departure, alteration, orinevitably—death. This life, unlike Diotima’s, seems to admit full-fledged conflictof values as well, since the lovers’ devotion to one another is so particular that itmight in some circumstances pull against their political commitments or theirpursuit of knowledge. . . . But Plato seems to believe that a life that lacks theirpassionate devotion—whether or not it had this at some former time—is lackingin beauty and value next to theirs.7

The Phaedrus ends with Socrates and the young Phaedrus (whose namemeans “sparkling”) discovering the “mutual love of individuals based oncharacter and aspiration,”8 quite subtly and gradually, in a wild dangerousplace outside the city gates, near the river and near the place where, accord-ing to a legend, a young girl was carried off by Boreas, the love-mad wind

7 Ibid., 221. Even the Stoics, as Nussbaum has argued elsewhere, famously attempt to some-how preserve eros at the heart of friendship (philia), as virtue’s bloom, beauty’s appearancethat, purified, inspires reverence and gratitude and not merely divisive, possessive desire.But as Cicero remarked in his critique of what he perceived as inconsistencies in the Stoictheory of love: eros is never truly present without “anxiety, longing, care sighing” (TusculanDisputations, 4:70). When the Stoics refer to the “attempt to form a friendship on accountof the appearing beauty of young men in their prime” (epibole philopoiias dia kallos em-phainomenon neon kai horaion), that is all well and good, but do not, says Cicero, “call iteros.” See Martha C. Nussbaum, “Eros and Ethical Norms: Philosophers Respond to a Cul-tural Dilemma,” in The Sleep of Reason: Erotic Experience and Sexual Ethics in AncientGreece and Rome, ed. Martha C. Nussbaum and Julia Sihvola (Chicago: University of Chi-cago Press, 2002), 56, 76–81, 81–82. Compare Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire:Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).

8 Nussbaum, “ ‘This Story Isn’t True,’ ” 233.

Extravagant Beholding6

god, and where the god Pan has his shrine. Socrates’ “recantation” speech,alluding in several images to Sappho’s fragments, extols the power of amad love that sends shudders, “strange sweating,” fever, and a tinglingwarmth inspired by the “stream of beauty” that enters “in through theeyes” of the lover at the sight of a “godlike” face of a beloved beautifulboy (251A–B). The speech is memorable for its vivid image-rich evocationof sexual joy and the pains of separation, love’s intense mad emotions,an exterior and interior jouissance and extravagant beholding that re-sponds to the physical beauty of a beloved (and so godlike) body. Andimmediately after his lyrical evocation of the positive, life-giving powerof eros that flows from the eyes, in a material “stream of particles” (imagesof desire here—himeros—are of flow, of a liquid light that inundates thesenses),9 Socrates sounds the register of eros’s inevitable (and seeminglyimmediate) decline; we have, sudden loss (exaiphnes in the Symposium),separation (choris), and the pain that “simply drives it [the soul] wild.”There are the temporary consolations of memory, though it is pain thatdominates the soul when it is separated from the immediate physicalpresence of the beloved. So one is moved back and forth, from ecstatic joy,this “sweetest of all pleasures” (edonen d’ au tauten glukutaten [251E5])to the stings of pain. In Socrates’ words, “From the outlandish mix of thesetwo feelings—pain and joy—comes anguish and helpless raving: in itsmadness the lover’s soul cannot sleep at night or stay put by day; it rushes,yearning, wherever it expects to see the person who has that beauty. Whenit does see him, it opens the sluice-gates of desire and sets free the partsthat were blocked up before” (251D–E).10 Socrates of the Phaedrus seemsto understand well the emotions of his old wayward lover Alcibiades, hisclaims of particularity in love. And just as Alcibiades does in the Sympo-sium, Socrates here claims to be speaking the “truth” about love in theform of a “likeness.” He uses images.

At the very end of the dialogue, Socrates prays to Pan. In Nussbaum’swords, the philosopher, rejecting “the simplicity of his former ideal” (in theSymposium speech), prays to “the mad erotic god, son of Hermes god ofluck, and to the other gods of this wild place, asking for a beautiful insideand an outside that will be loved by that inside” (279B–C).11

9 Nehamas and Woodruff note that the word here used for “desire,” himeros, is fancifullyderived from mere (“particles”), ienai (“go”), and rhein (“flow”): thus the parenthetical em-phasis on the word. They also draw attention to a “different but equally fanciful Platonicderivation of the same word” in Cratylus 420A, where it is linked with images of “flow”(hrous) and eros from esron, “flowing in.” Earlier, in 418 C–D, himeros is derived fromhimeirousi, “to long for” light (in the darkness). Here Socrates works out from the words forday, himera or emera. See Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995), 40.

10 Ibid., 40–41.11 Nussbaum, “This Story Isn’t True,” 232–33.


descending the stairs

At the heart of erotic love there lives a felt experience of difference, ofunresolvable singularities, along with the most thoroughgoing visions ofideals and universal ennobling virtues. A source of loving bliss, of tran-scendental energies, eros also writes suffering and separation into ourbodies. What goes up in love, what ascends, must, finally, inevitably, inspite of our philosophies, come down. One must descend the stairs. Ul-timately, one might say that love, and certainly the beloved, love’s ulti-mate object, is something, in its essential final unattainability, “yet to be,”or perhaps something always “about to be,” l’à-venir, a “process” phrasethat Derrida will use instead of the secure, already decided confident“future” (le futur).12 We have yet to arrive at the beloved.

We languish in instability, uncertainty, division, openness, even “des-tinerrance,” another Derridean coinage.13 Love is foiled in its destination:eros the nonarriving, the everreaching. Like Sappho’s apple:

As a sweet apple turns red on a high branch,high on the highest branch and the applepickers

forgot—well, no they didn’t forget—were not able to reach.14

extravagant beholding: religious transformations of a lyric

love motif

I argue here that various tensions in the life of eros outlined above arevividly present in a particular literary motif common to devotional liter-atures of four different religious traditions—Jewish, Christian, Islamic,and Hindu—and present in four different languages: Hebrew, the Greekof the Septuagint Bible, Arabic, and Sanskrit.15 This motif in Jewish and

12 For a central discussion of venir and à venir, see Derrida’s essay, “Psyché: Inventionsde l’autre,” trans. Catherine Porter in Reading Paul de Man Reading, ed. Lindsay Waters andWlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). See also a readingof this thematic in Derrida in John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida:Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), esp. 69–76.

13 For an exhaustive study of images of “nonarrival” and, most specifically, “destinerrance”throughout the work of Derrida, see Catherine Malabou and Jacques Derrida, Counterpath:Traveling with Jacques Derrida, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,2004), esp. 60–63.

14 From Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta, 105A, in Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, 26.15 An early version of this article was given as a paper for the panel “Erotic Figuring

of Divine Love in Jewish and Hindu Traditions,” Comparative Studies in Hinduisms andJudaisms Group, American Academic of Religion Annual Meeting, Atlanta, November 24,2003. See also, for my early thinking on the Song of Songs and South Indian poetry, StevenHopkins, “In Love with the Body of God: Eros and the Praise of Icons in South IndianDevotion,” Journal of Vaisnava Studies 2, no. 1 (Winter 1993): 17–54.


Islamic literatures is called by the Arabic term wasf (pl. awsaf ), which lit-erally means “description,” a poetic passage that describes in sequence, andby means of a series of exaggerated, sometimes artificial images, the partsof a body (divine or human). In the medieval South Indian ‡rivaisnavaHindu tradition, such a sequential description, most commonly reservedfor deities, is called an anubhava, a “relish” or “enjoyment experience” ofthe body of the god Vishnu, from toe to head or head to toe, in his materialform of a temple image. In ‡rivaisnava anubhavas, like the wasfs of theearly pre-Islamic Arabic odes and their later Sufi Islamic religious trans-formations, or the flamboyant wasfs of the Hebrew Song of Songs, the bodyof the beloved dissembles itself into dozens of similes and metaphors,an excess that dazzles and expands in the lover’s gaze to extraordinary,multiple forms, into cosmic and earthly landscapes, across historical andmythical time, taking on animal and cultic forms. Meanwhile, the lover’sbody remains, in varied degrees, simultaneously concrete and individual-ized, the beloved who stands before the lover, literally or in the elasticpresence of memory, as his or her own. Through the anubhava and thewasf, respectively, we are able to glimpse a form of love language, whatI am calling an extravagant beholding, that holds in tension together idealvisionary forms with the concrete, material reality of the individual objectof love: we touch, all at once, particularity, presence, and transcendence,even the experience of absence and erotic deferral, in the charged hori-zontal space of the poem.

I argue here that many of the unresolved, even willed, ambiguitiesof eros that we have alluded to through Derrida’s reluctant commentaryon love and Nussbaum’s readings of Plato’s dialogues find an elegantthough sometimes fragile balance in the wasf and anubhava. In effect,this rather obscure motif of love poetry and its transformations in Jewish,Christian, Islamic, and Hindu religious literatures rival the attempt—equally rhetorical and lyrical, with its own store of extravagant images—of Plato’s Socrates in the Phaedrus to provide a place in language for theblissful and tortuous excesses of eros, its ideal virtues and ideal beautybut also its passionate beholding of another person, its longing to possessa particular body, the awesome almost material infusion of beauty throughthe eyes in the concrete act of seeing and being seen:

First he shudders and a fear comes over him. . . . Then he gazes at him with thereverence due to a god, and if he weren’t afraid people would think him com-pletely mad, he’d even sacrifice to his boy as if he were the image of a god. Oncehe has looked at him, his chill gives way to sweating and a high fever, becausethe stream of beauty that pours into him through his eyes warms him up andwaters the growth of his wings. Meanwhile, the heat warms him and melts theplaces where the wings once grew, places that were long closed off with hard

One Line Short


scabs to keep the sprouts from coming back; but as nourishment flows in, thefeather shafts swell and rush to grow from their roots beneath every part of thesoul (long ago, you see, the entire soul had wings). Now the whole soul seethesand throbs in this condition. Like a child whose teeth are just starting to growin, and its gums are all aching and itching—that is exactly how the soul feelswhen it begins to grow wings. It swells up and aches and tingles as it growsthem. But when it looks upon the beauty of the boy and takes in the stream ofparticles flowing into it from his beauty (that is why it is called “desire”), when itis watered and warmed by this, then all its pain subsides and is replaced by joy.(251A–C)16

The issues that haunt Derrida and the Greeks draw their shadows acrossthe wasf and anubhava in very different cultural and religious contexts. Aswe will see, it is through the wasf and the anubhava that love language,swelling and aching and itching, “grows wings.” Its metaphors and similesthrow verbal bridges across empty space that serve both to connect and toseparate lover from beloved; to touch and to preserve difference, at one andthe same time: to defer finality and to prolong a certain insatiable desire.Through close readings of particular poetic texts in Hebrew, Arabic, andSanskrit, we will also see how the particular and the universal, Derrida’s“who” and “what” of love, love’s crushing experience of separation,absence, defeat, and fissure, its one foot in the grave of the ideal and itsvisions of blissful presence, are expressed in exquisite literary forms thatcrosscut secular and religious forms of love.

I will treat the motif in each tradition in turn, beginning with the Hebrewand Greek Song of Songs, noting in brief Jewish and Christian commen-tarial traditions, followed by the Arabic, qasidah in its Islamic and pre-Islamic forms, Greek Jewish texts, and the anubhava in the ‡rivaisnavatradition in South India, with special focus on the poetry of the medievalsaint-poet Ve“kate¶a. In the conclusion I will return to themes introducedat the beginning of the article, with the addition of Augustine and Danteon “ladders of love,” linking these insights on love, ideal bodies, and par-ticularity with the study of the wasf and anubhava.

ii. love’s body in the song of songs and the arabic odes

The wasf literary motif is only one of many striking characteristics of TheSong of Songs, a text that remains unique and singularly obscure amongall other texts of the Hebrew canon. Before we discuss in greater detailthe significance of this motif in the Song for the themes of love, ideal

16 Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Nehamas and Woodruff, 40. For a gloss on the “stream of par-ticles” and the word “desire,” see n. 9 above.


bodies, and particularity, it is best to say a few words about the text itself,its provenance, and its place in the Bible.

The Song of Songs is one of the most important root texts for Jewishand Christian spirituality. The Shir ha-Shirim, this strange, rich, evocative,late biblical text—its cosmopolitan vocabulary points to post-Exilic, mostlikely the Hellenistic period in Palestine, around third century BCE—haslong drawn to itself controversy and detailed commentary by Jewish andChristian scholastics, theologians, and mystics.17 It is a sequence of lovepoems, at its core a dialogue between a lover, the dark-skinned femaleShulammite, and her male Beloved.18 The poem cycle’s origins are obscureand its particular provenance unknown. Reflecting a variety of languagesand traditions—Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, even South Indian (there areseveral Tamil loanwords in the Song)—the Hebrew text is filled with un-familiar terms, words of doubtful origin, striking lacunae, and many thornylocutions.19 It does not trace any linear movement in the lover’s unionand separation but ends rather abruptly with the Shulammite chargingher Beloved to “run away, my love, and be like a gazelle . . . on the

17 For a detailed treatment of the origins and provenance of the Song, see the introduc-tion to Ariel Bloch and Chana Bloch, The Song of Songs: A New Translation (Berkeley: Uni-versity of California Press, 1998).

18 As Bloch and Bloch note, ha-shulammit is of uncertain meaning. Medieval Jewishexegetes like Ibn Ezra understood the word as an epithet, “the Jerusalemite [fem.],” derivedfrom shalem, a “poetic term for Jerusalem, and one of the city’s ancient names.” See ibid.,197–98.

19 I will not attempt here to enter into a discussion of The Song of Songs and ancient Tamilsecular love poetry. Several years ago Chaim Rabin wrote what since has become an often-cited article on the sources of the Song in the classical Tamil literature of ancient South India(“The Song of Songs and Tamil Poetry,” Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 3, no. 3[1973–74]: 205–19). Basing his thesis on certain striking Tamil loanwords in Hebrew, he pos-tulates that “the Song of Songs was written in the heyday of Judean trade with South Arabiaand beyond (and this may include the lifetime of King Solomon) by someone who hadhimself traveled to South Arabia and to South India and that had there become acquaintedwith Tamil poetry” (216). This is a suggestive thesis that relies, particularly in the case ofancient Tamil love poetry, on dating that is highly questionable. The probable dates of theearliest Tamil texts themselves (ca. 100 BCE–250 CE) are too late to fit Rabin’s theory ofSouth Indian influence, a theory based almost entirely on the exaggerated claims of Tamiltradition that the poems go back millennia in time, though they more closely match the datessuggested in recent scholarly work on the Song (Hellenistic Palestine around the thirdcentury BCE). Compare the study by Abraham Mariaselvam, The Song of Songs and AncientTamil Love Poems: Poetry and Symbolism (Roma: Editrice Pontifico Istituto Biblico, 1988),which takes up the comparison in much greater detail than Rabin. Though Mariaselvambrings to his comparative study an encyclopedic knowledge of the Tamil originals, as well asknowledge of Hebrew, there is still no evidence put forth as to genetic influence. His findingsin Appendix I (279–86), where he recounts in some detail the discussions on the possible de-pendence of the Song on Ca“kam Tamil poetry, are inconclusive, other than ruling out an apriori negative answer. Obviously, far more work needs to be done on this fascinating topic.For an exhaustive discussion of the problems of dating the corpus of classical Tamil poems,see Kamil Zvelebil, The Smile of Murugan: On Tamil Literature of South India (Leiden:Brill, 1973), 4–5, 42–43.


mountains of spices.”20 Its strangeness and difficulty have marked it fromthe beginning as a text particularly sacred, one that, in the words of earlyrabbis, “defiles the hands”; it is paradigmatic “scripture” hidden in theenigmatic sheaths of a love poem where God’s name is never mentioned.It sits on the page, just as it is, quietly compelling, issuing its disarmingchallenge to the religious imagination. According to one rabbinic tradition,it is precisely the pshat, the literal meaning of this love poem that is mostesoteric (sod ).21

Its language, in Hebrew, Greek, or Latin, pushes the limits of phys-icality in its depiction of human love. “Love” in the Hebrew Song doesnot embrace only the generalized semantic registers of ªahab ¤, a wordthat holds a variety of meanings in the Bible, from “lust” in the story ofAmnon and Tamar (2 Sam. 13:4, 15), to the love of parent, one’s brother,or sister; to love of spouse; or to love of “all humankind.” The Song inHebrew, in the very first line, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of hismouth, for your loving is sweeter than wine,” praises not ªahab ¤, general-ized, universal love, but the plural form dodim (dodeyk ¤a, “your dodim”),literally “loving,” “lovemaking,” kisses, caresses, intercourse.22 The textcelebrates, in idealized literary pastoral form, the intimate, individual,vulnerable, unstable, physical lovemaking and passionate desire of twobodies, and this sense of vivid physicality drives all the commentariesthat attempt to show how these love poems speak about love of God. Thetext also plays with this rich term, punning with dudaªim, the mandrake,a large-leaved, purple-flowered aphrodisiac with juicy golden fruit. Loveof God and Knesset Israel or the individual Jew is, inescapably, the love oftwo bodies.23

It is the same in Greek and Latin. Dodim in the Greek Azma (inthe Septuagint) is translated, in a most wonderful misprision that readsdadayk for dodayk, mastoi—in the Latin text of the Canticle it is uberaor mammae—“breasts,” an image that combines in a physical image bothfertility and sensual immediacy.24 Gregory of Nyssa used this imagery ofbreasts to great sensual effect in his Canticle commentary, associating it

20 For commentary on this last cryptic phrase, see Bloch and Bloch, The Song of Songs,220–21.

21 See Shmuel Yerushalmi, The Book of Shir HaShirim: Me’am Lo’ez, trans. Zvi Faier(New York: Moznaim, 1988), 4.

22 See commentary in Bloch and Bloch, The Song of Songs, 137, where it is noted that “theword ‘love’ [for dodeyk ¤a] in most translations is too general and evasive.”

23 This punning is lost in the Greek and Latin, where mandrake is simply mandragoraeand dodim is mastoi/ubera. See below.

24 The Septuaginta reads hoti agathoi mastoi sou huper oinon, and the Vulgata reads quiameliora sunt ubera tua vino. I am grateful to Daniel Boyarin for pointing out to me thedadayk/dodayk misreading.


with luminous warmth and milky flow; “breasts of wine”; fountains ofthe fluid, moving, and fecund presence of God.25 Though the Greek textof the Song itself uses agape and its various verbal transformations for“love” and for being in love (2:4, 7), Greek Christian commentators suchas Origen and Gregory of Nyssa often associate agape’s actual pitchof meaning as equivalent to eros, a word that, as we have already noted,carries a semantic register of intense desire, inexplicable wounding, andunstable yearning. In Gregory’s commentaries on the Song, eros, and notthe more generalized agape, best describes love of God as “infinite in-satiability,” sharp yearning, at once painful and blissful, which leads oneon the path to an “eternal progress” (epektasis) in God. At one point inhis Canticle commentary, Gregory notes: “For heightened agape is callederos” (epitetamene gar agape eros legetai ).26 Latin commentators likeBernard of Clairvaux use the word amor, shared by troubadour traditionsof southern France, and sometimes diligende, but rarely caritas, to describethe religious love that lies beneath or behind the lovers’ voices in theSong.27 The Vulgata text itself uses various terms interchangeably, mostlyforms of caritas and dilectio, though Canticle 2:5, “for I languish withlove,” is the vivid quia amore langueo, the single use of the word amor inthe Latin Song.28 Eros and amor, religious eros and amor, stake a claimthrough the Song as the most appropriate words to describe love of God.29

25 See Martin Laird, “Fountain of Presence, Breasts of Wine: The Flow of Knowledge inthe In Canticum canticorum,” in his Gregory of Nyssa and the Grasp of Faith (New York:Oxford University Press, 2004), 131–53.

26 From Oratio 13 (5, 10), 1048C, in Gregorii Nysseni Opera, ed. W. Jaeger, vol. 6,Gregorii Nysseni in Canticum Canticorum, ed. Hermannus Langerbeck (Leiden: Brill,1960), 383. See this text citation and an excellent discussion of the identification of agape

with “eros intensity” and “wounded” love in Origen and Gregory in Catherine Osborne,Eros Unveiled: Plato and the God of Love (Oxford: Clarenden, 1994), 70–79.

27 For an excellent summary study of the Song of Songs commentaries in medieval Chris-tianity (one that includes mention of Origen and Gregory of Nyssa in the Christian East,along with the Mariological commentaries), see E. Ann Matter. The Voice of My Beloved:The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl-vania Press, 1990). For a general introduction by Jean Danielou and a fine selection of trans-lated texts from Gregory of Nyssa’s commentary on the Canticle, see From Glory to Glory:Texts from Gregory of Nyssa’s Mystical Writings, trans. and ed. Herbert Musurillo, SJ(Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995).

28 In Hebrew, holat ªahab ¤ah, using here the word ªahab ¤ in its sense of intense desire.29 In medieval Latin amor suggests a basis more in the physical than in the intellectual:

iecore amamus, “we love with our livers,” reports Isidore of Seville (Etymologiae XI, 1:27).Amor can sometimes be distinguished, as Isidore states, from dilectio, a word that refers toa love that comes from deliberate intellectual choice (Etymologiae VIII, 2:7). I am indebtedto Robert Newlin for these references. See his rich and suggestive PhD thesis on Latin beastliteratures, “Cunning Ambassadors” (Department of Comparative Literature, Rutgers Uni-versity, 2004). See also, for the destinies of The Song in the Latin tradition, Peter Dronke,“The Song of Songs and Medieval Love-Lyric,” in his The Medieval Poet and His World(Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1984), 209–36.


The Shir ha-Shirim—Asma in Greek, the Cantica canticorum in Latin—inspires a rich tradition of what one might call religious transformationsof the love lyric.

flaunted figuration: the waSf in the song

How sweet is your love my sister my brideyour loving is more fragrant than wine

your perfumes sweeter than any spices

Your lips drop sweetness like the honeycomb my bridehoney and milk are under your tongue

and your dress has the scent of Lebanon

A garden locked is my sister my brideA hidden fountain a sealed spring

Your branches are an orchard of pomegranatesan orchard full of choice fruits

spikenard and saffron aromatic cane and cinnamonwith every frankincense tree

myrrh and aloeswith all the most exquisite spices30

Many have come across these curious lines in the Song, in various trans-lations from various editions, with delight and not a little amazement. Thelovers in the Hebrew Song of Songs describe the body of their belovedfrom foot to head or head to foot in hyperbole that at times seems to borderon the comic and grotesque. The innovative metaphors and similes of thelovers leap across chasms of association in what Robert Alter has calleda poetics of “flaunted figuration.”31 Yet in spite of its strangeness, theirlanguage is charged with feeling and presence; it expresses an alluring,

30 Translation adapted from the Jewish Publication Society edition from the Hebrew,Oxford Jewish Study Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); the Revised EnglishBible, with Apocrypha (Oxford/Cambridge: Oxford University Press/Cambridge UniversityPress, 1989); and Bloch and Bloch, The Song of Songs. See the detailed philological notes inBloch and Bloch, 175–77: the translations are all somewhat inaccurate, based as they areupon a combination of sources, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and the root in each languagecontains many layers of meaning.

31 See his chapter on the Song: Robert Alter, “The Garden of Metaphor,” in his The Art ofBiblical Poetry (New York: Basic, 1986), 196. Alter distinguishes in this chapter betweenstock, intensive, and innovative imagery (the latter strikingly apparent in Job and in theSong). See also page 193: “It should be observed, to begin with, that in the Song of Songsthe process of figuration is frequently ‘foregrounded’—which is to say, as the poet takes ex-pressive advantage of representing something through an image that brings out a salientquality it shares with the referent, he calls our attention to his exploitation of similitude, tothe artifice of metaphorical representation.”


even disarming, erotic energy. In chapters 4:1–7 and 6:4–7 of this text oflove songs that Rabbi Akiba in the second century is said to have praisedas the “Holy of Holies,”32 the female beloved’s eyes are doves behind “athicket of hair” (sammah: locks, tresses, mass of hair);33 her hair a flockof goats streaming down Mount Gilead; her teeth a flock of newly shornewes, “freshly come up from the dipping; all of them have twins andnone has lost a lamb”; her parted lips (or forehead, depending on thetranslation) behind her veil is like a pomegranate split open; her neck ornose a tower, “David’s tower, which is built with encircling courses, athousand bucklers hang upon it, and all are warrior’s shields”; her twobreasts are like two fawns, “twin fawns of a gazelle grazing among thelilies.” Here the body of the beloved becomes, within the scope of thelover’s gaze, numbingly plural—it disseminates into landscapes, intogardens, orchards, and wilderness at once natural and cultural/pastoral;into shrines, sacred mountains, towers, walls, vineyards, and warrior’shalls—while remaining a singular, individual, discrete other, a beloved(the dark-skinned Shulammite) who finally, and mysteriously, disappears.The poem sequence ends midstream, almost breathless, with a call, alonging, for return:

Run away my loveand be like the gazelle or the young stag

on the mountains of spices

The radical presence evoked in the charged language of loving descrip-tion is combined in the Song with a sense of suspension, of a love (for thetime being) lost and (perhaps) just about to be regained. Presence is linkedto deferral, what is (always) yet to be.

32 This well-known palinode is from Mishnah Yadaim III:5: “Said Rabbi Akiba: Heavenforbid that any man in Israel ever disputed that the Song of Songs renders the hands unclean,for the whole world is not worth the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel, forall the Writings are holy, and the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies.” Quoted in FrancisLandy, Paradoxes of Paradise: Identity and Difference in the Song of Songs (Sheffield:Almond, 1983), 13. And this identification of the Song with the sanctuary of the Temple neednot be merely metaphorical, if we keep in mind the very ancient Jewish tradition, recorded inthe Talmud and reiterated by the Kabbalists, of the Holy of Holies as a bedroom where thecherubim lay in sexual embrace like a husband and wife. The divine presence (the Shekhinah)was said to dwell between the two cherubim in the Temple as it does now between the pioushusband and wife. It is thus no wonder that a love poem would be seen by the tradition ascentral to its divine mystery. For a detailed account of the sexual symbolism and its “theurgic”meaning in Jewish mysticism, see Moshe Idel, “Sexual Metaphors and Praxis in the Kabbalah,”in The Jewish Family: Metaphor and Memory, ed. David Kraemer (New York: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1989), 197–224. For a detailed treatment of the place of the Song in Midrash,see Daniel Boyarin, “The Song of Songs: Lock or Key? Intertextuality, Allegory as Midrash,”in The Book and the Text: The Bible and Literary Theory, edited by Regina M. Schwartz(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 214–30.

33 See commentary on this verse in Bloch and Bloch, The Song of Songs, 166–68.


One of the most vivid of poetic sequences describes the dancing Shu-lammite from the feet up. I quote from Marcia Falk’s fine contemporarytranslation of the Song:

Dance for us, princess, danceas we watch and chant!

What will you see as I movein the dance of love?

Your graceful, sandaled feet,your thighs—two spinning jewels,your hips—a bowl of nectar

brimming full

Your belly—golden wheatadorned with daffodils,your breasts—two fawns, the twinsof a gazelle

Your neck—an ivory tower,your eyes—two silent pools,your face—a tower that overlooks

the hills

Your head—majestic mountaincrowned with purple hair,captivating kings

within its locks (7:2–6)34

But these descriptions do not concentrate only on the female body, themale lover’s erotic enjoyment. In 5:10–16 the girl describes her loverfrom head to foot. Again in Falk’s translation:

My love is radiantAs gold or crimson,Hair in waves of blackLike wings of ravens.

34 Quotations are from poems 15 and 22 in Marcia Falk’s edition of the Song, The Song ofSongs. A New Translation and Interpretation (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1990). See com-mentaries of Bloch and Bloch, The Song of Songs, 199–206, for the many linguistic issuesand choices involved in translating these rich and often ambiguous verses. A comparison ofFalk with various Bible translations also helps to open the original text to readers in all itsrich literal registers of meaning and begs the question on the inevitable limitation of everytranslation.


Eyes like doves, afloatUpon the water,Bathed in milk, at restOn brimming pools.

Cheeks like beds of spices,Banks of flowers,Lips like lilies, sweetAnd wet with dew.

Studded with jewels, his armsAre round and golden,His belly smooth as ivory,Bright with gems.

Set in gold, his legs,Two marble columns—He stands as proud as cedarsIn the mountains.

Man of pleasure—sweetTo taste his love!Friend and lover chosenFor my love. (5:10–16)35

The exact origin of this descriptive motif is unclear. It has only beensince the last century, when similarities between the Song and pre-sixth-century Arabic poetry were first noticed, that critics and biblical scholarshave referred to this genre of poetic description by the Arabic word wasf.There are analogous, though not as well-developed, limb-by-limb de-scriptions in the earlier secular love poetry of Egypt. The Egyptiansongs, though they come down to us from a time remote from the currentscholarly dates of the Song’s composition (ca. 4–2 BCE), share with theHebrew cycle of poems the provenance of Palestine and perhaps, asMichael V. Fox has argued, the same local literary tradition.36 Even thoughgenetic links are impossible to prove, Fox contends that the Egyptiansongs are one, if not the main, source for the imagery and poetics of theHebrew Song.37 Whatever the cogency of this theory (it is one of many

35 This passage occurs in poem 19 of Falk’s edition: Falk, The Song of Songs. Again, seethe detailed notes of Bloch and Bloch on these verses: Bloch and Bloch, The Song of Songs,184–88.

36 See Michael V. Fox, The Song of Songs and the Ancient Egyptian Love Songs (Madison:University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), esp. i–xxvii.

37 See, in this regard, Fox’s remarks: “The Egyptian love songs give us an idea of whatan ancient Israelite audience would have expected in a love song, thus helping fill out the


competing theories on the literary and religious origins of the Song),38

there are scattered among the Twentieth-Dynasty papyrae passages suchas the following that bear some resemblance to the sequential descriptionsof and by the Shulammite beloved:

One alone is (my) sister, having no peer:more gracious than all other women.

Behold her, like Sothis risingat the beginning of a good year:

shining, precious, white of skin,lovely of eyes when gazing.

Sweet her lips (when) speaking:she has no excess of words.

Long of neck, white of breast,her hair true lapis lazuli.

Her arms surpass gold,her fingers are like lotuses.

Her full buttocks, her narrow waist,her thighs carry on her beauties.

Lovely when she strides on the ground.she has captured my heart in her embrace.39

jewish sources outside the song

As for the motif of the wasf in Jewish tradition, it is often said the onlyexamples in all of ancient Hebrew literature of this convention are in theSong of Songs.

But there is at least, as Shaye J. D. Cohen has argued, one exceptionto this rule.40 The genre reappeared in Jewish literature as early as theGenesis Apocryphon, one of the manuscripts of the Dead Sea Scrolls

38 Along with the theories of Egyptian and South Indian origins, as well as the theoriesthat the Song is made up of a collection of ancient Near Eastern wedding songs or fragmentsof the liturgy of a fertility cult, one of the more suggestive recent accounts is by Marvin H.Pope in his edition of the Song for the Anchor Bible—The Song of Songs: A New Translationwith Introduction and Commentary, Anchor Bible, vol. 7C (New York: Doubleday, 1977).Pope’s theory is that the Song is connected in some way to mortuary cults or funeral feasts ofthe ancient Near East that, according to some scholars, were ritually organized feasts of love.

39 From the P. Chester Beatty I papyrus, group A, no. 31, translated in Fox, The Song ofSongs and the Ancient Egyptian Love Songs, 52.

40 See Shaye J. D. Cohen, “The Beauty of Flora and the Beauty of Sarai,” Helios 8, no. 2(1981): 41–53. I am indebted to Moshe Idel for this reference.

generic context lacking in extent Hebrew literature. . . . In my opinion the similarities justifya hypothesis of at least indirect dependence, that is to say, the supposition that the Song is alate offshoot of an ancient and continuous literary tradition, one whose roots we find, in partat least, in the Egyptian love poetry. I do not assume that the author of the Song necessarilyknew Egyptian or borrowed directly from Egyptian originals (though that is by no means im-possible). It is more likely that Egyptian love poetry was sung in Palestine, where it becameincorporated into the local literature and developed there in new ways” (ibid., xxii, xxiv).


written in Hellenized Palestine during the first century BCE. The authorof the Apocryphon adds to the Genesis 12:10–20 account of Abram andSarai among the Egyptians: his praise of Sarai includes a sequential head-to-foot description of her beauty.41 But in this case his model, as Cohenargues, is not the Song, but one of the epigrams of his contemporaryPhilodemus, a Syrian of Gadara who around 70 BCE went to Italy toembark on a literary career and who was one of the first to incorporatethis literary device into the love poetry of the West. The Jewish writer,who, like Philodemus, flourished in a Hellenized environment, followedthe pattern of the Syrian poet in blending descriptions of bodily beautywith a particularly Hellenistic emphasis on feminine wisdom, intelligence,and skill (an aspect absent from the Song).42 As Cohen suggests, “Eachindependently Hellenized the Near Eastern descriptive song.”43

a presentational poetics

With the genealogy of the genre and its many variations in mind, howmight we interpret awsaf in the Song? What does this form of love lan-guage in the Song tell us about our theme of particular and ideal bodies?

The literal meanings of awsaf simply provoke smiles—we are forcedto muse on the radically different notions of beauty held by an ancientpeople. We certainly cannot impose a self-conscious surrealist poetic ofaesthetic shock on this ancient material. Perhaps we might take a moreacademic approach, viewing the awsaf not as descriptive love songs butas parodies or, more soberly, as learned allusions to sculptural or archi-tectural forms. There may indeed be a cultic element in such sequentialdescriptions, particularly of the male body, where we read allusions to

41 The text describing Sarai “more or less from the head to the feet” (ibid., 46) is put intothe mouth of the courtier Hirquanos, whose description is decidedly more chaste in imageryand diction than the one of the author of the Song: “How splen[did] and beautiful the form ofher face, and how . . . and how soft the hair of her head; how lovely are her eyes and howpleasant is her nose and all the radiance of her face . . . ; how lovely is her breast and howbeautiful is all her whiteness! Her arms, how beautiful! And her hands, how perfect! And(how) [attrac]tive all the appearance of her hands! How lovely [are] her palms, and how longand dainty all the fingers of her hands. Her feet, how beautiful! How perfect her legs! Thereare no virgins or brides who enter a bridal chamber more beautiful than she. Indeed, herbeauty surpasses that of all women: her beauty is high above all of them. Yet with all thisbeauty there is much wisdom in her; and whatever she has.” Translated in Cohen, “The Beautyof Flora,” 45–46.

42 Philodemus’s witty epigram is, like the praise of Hirquanos in the Apocryphon, moreapostrophic than lyrical, as it is built upon a series of vocatives to the beloved’s feet, legs,thighs, buttocks, sex (kteis), hips, shoulders, breasts, neck, etc. This lack of metaphorictexture also sets it apart from the densely figurative style of the Song.

43 Cohen, “The Beauty of Flora,” 48. Among the possible influences on Philodemus otherthan the ancient Near Eastern song, one of the more fruitful seems to be the genre of ekphrasis(‘description’), defined, as Cohen observes, by the ancient rhetoricians as an “elaborate andembellished description of a person or an object, usually of a work of art” (ibid., 43).


ivory and marble.44 As Richard N. Soulen has observed, such a realistapproach to this poetic of description, whether it be to point to its grotes-queries as an example of carnival or even to analyze it in terms of ancientEgyptian iconography, rather misses the point.45 The latter is a perfect ex-ample of what Alter calls “misplaced concreteness.”46 It is obvious fromany detailed reading of these passages that neither a cultic nor a purelyartistic context would entirely explain the exuberant, exaggerated similesand metaphors of the awsaf.

The purpose of the wasf in the Song, Soulen suggests, is “presenta-tional rather than representational.” “Its purpose,” Soulen observes, “isnot to provide a parallel to visual appearance” or “primarily to describefeminine or masculine qualities metaphorically.”47 Rather, the images wantto evoke feeling; they “seek to create emotion, not critical or dispassionatecomprehension; their goal is a total response, not simply a cognitive one.”48

The lovers’ metaphorical hyperbole is, in Soulen’s words, “the languageof joy” that seeks to “overwhelm and delight the hearer.”49 We are in-vited, even greatly coerced, to share a lover’s awe, joy, and erotic delightin the physical beauty of the beloved and, beyond, in his or her qualitiesand virtues that create a rich imagistic world of their own, sometimesdissolving the original focus of gazing.

As a physical response to the flood of beauty that enters the eyes, thelovers of the Song delight in recreating each other’s bodies through verbalart. The visual exaggerations of the wasf are related to other rhetoricalextravagances of the text, which include tactile images of entering, eating,tasting, and feasting on the beloved and the olfactory eroticism of flowers,

44 See Bloch and Bloch, The Song of Songs, 185.45 See Richard Soulen’s article “The Wasfs of the Song of Songs and Hermeneutic,”

Journal of Biblical Literature 86, pt. 2 (June 1967): 183–90. Soulen refers, on 185–87, toM. H. Segal’s theory of literary parody, Morris Jastrow Jr.’s notion of difference in aesthetictaste, and Gillis Gerleman’s obsession with Egyptian art and ornamental figures in the awsaf.See also Fox’s exegesis of the awsaf in The Song of Songs and the Ancient Egyptian LoveSongs, 140–65, which basically follows Gerleman and Pope—though with some importantmisgivings—in its emphasis on the tropes’ origin in works of art, artifacts, icons, and sculp-ture. For a sense of his ambivalence on this, however, see the following remark: “Some ofthe imagery in this section [5:10–16] is drawn from the arts: the head of gold, the arms likecylinders of gold, thighs like marble pillars on gold sockets, the belly like an ivory bar. Onlythe gold head is taken from sculpture, so we cannot suppose that the boy is being describedas if he were a statue (contrary to Gerleman)” (Fox, The Song of Songs and the AncientEgyptian Love Songs, 147).

46 Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry, 196.47 Soulen, “The Wasfs of the Song of Songs,” 187.48 Ibid., 188. See Michael Sells, “The Guises of the Ghul: Dissembling Simile and Semantic

Overflow in the Classic Arabic Nasib,” in Reorientations/Arabic and Persian Poetry, ed.Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevyah (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994) 130–64, for asimilar argument with regard to the Arabic odes.

49 Soulen, “The Wasfs of the Song of Songs,” 190.


fruits, spices, perfumes, and the many aromas of the hills, fields, andcountryside. And the Song not only engages the senses one at a time butalso often mingles them in a vivid synesthesia, as in one of its first images,where the beloved’s name is said to be a “spreading perfume.”

Through such synesthesia and extravagance of rhetoric the awsaf ofThe Song of Songs create a charged field of metaphoric energies betweenthe particular other lover, her concrete presence for the lover who gazes ather (and recreates her, over and again, by that gazing), and a dissemblingsemantic overflow that blurs boundaries, that defers final possession ofthe other person but also draws out a certain erotic relish. Built into thestructure of these elaborate descriptions is an affirmation both of physicalpossession, intimate delectation, and (immanent) loss, an endless oscil-lation between seeming arrival and separation, the beloved’s discretepresence and at the same time her boundlessness, her infinity of forms.We have here, in literary form, to return to Sappho’s phrase, eros bliss-fully, even insatiably, “nonarriving,” the soul growing wings watered bystreams of beauty that enter through the eyes in Socrates’ Phaedrus speech,verbal horripilation, affirming what Gregory of Nyssa called in his Songcommentaries “eternal progress” (epektasis).

Such “nonarrival,” however, never overly darkens the overarching sunnyaspect of this cycle of love poems. The main register of the Song is joyand joyous anticipation, in spite of eros’s willed deferral. Though the Songitself seems to end with separation, a call and an absence, its rhetoric,deeply informed by the images of the wasf, is about an inevitable and re-liable presence that overwhelms and delights and that multiplies delight.Deferral here is jouissance. The “who” and the “what” of love are heldin elegant tension here, a tension that excites, withholds, releases, with-draws, but ultimately pleases. Here is language that raises the hairs at theback of the neck, that transforms ache and tingle into metaphor, simile, anetwork of symbols “thrown across” two bodies in love.50 This is not,however, always the case with the wasf and its rhetorical roles in a poem.

With this in mind, we turn now to the very different context of theArabic odes.

the waSf in arabic qaSIdah: memory of what is lost—extravagant

description and absence

As we have already noted, wasf, used by critics to refer to a motif in TheSong of Songs, is an Arabic term that literally means “description,” a poeticpassage that describes in sequence, and by means of a series of exagger-

50 For a discussion of the nature of the symbol as something that both unites and separates,putting into tension together sameness and difference in a way that matches similar tensionsin the life of eros, see Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, 70–76, 109–10.


ated, sometimes artificial images, the parts of the human body.51 The termwasf refers most specifically to a poetic form used by poets in the earlypre-Islamic Arabic odes (pre-622 CE).

Michael Sells has studied the poetry and poetics of the Arabic odesand their later religious transformations in the Sufi poetry of Ibn ºArabi

and has come to a conclusion about the uses of the wasf that differs fromwhat we see in the Song. The balance, however precarious, between the“who” and the “what” does not seem to be present at all. In the Arabicand later the Islamic mystical context, the awsaf and their semantic ex-travagances serve to evoke not only an elusive erotic/divine presence butalso, and perhaps most important, absence.52 The rich dissembling similes,imagery, and metaphors serve to evoke increasing distance and a contin-uous metamorphosis, finally, memory of what is lost: the beloved as aconcrete individual presence evaporates in the dissembling semantic over-flows of the wasf. I quote a section of Sells’s translation from a poem ofGhaylan Ibn ºUqba, also called Dhu al-Rumma, one of the finest poetsof the late classical period, where the narrator is in search of the elusiveBeloved, Mayya:

Her buttocks like a duneover which a rain shower falls

matting the sandas it sprinkles down

Her hair-fallover the lower curve of her back

soft as the moringa’s gossamer flowers,curled with pins and combed,

With long cheek hollowswhere tears flow,

and a lengthened curve at the breast sashwhere it crosses and falls.

You see her ear pendantalong the exposed ridge of her neck,

swaying out,dangling over the abyss.

51 See the section on awsaf in Falk, The Song of Songs, 217–35.52 Michael Sells draws attention to the “dissembling similes” and “semantic overflow” of

the wasf in the classic pre-Islamic Arabic odes and in later Sufi poetry. Such “semantic over-flow” is part and parcel of head-to-foot descriptions of the alluring female beloved, the ghul,in this pre–seventh-century literature. See his “Guises of the Ghul.” See also, for translationsof such poetry, Michael Sells, Desert Tracings: Six Classic Arabian Odes by ºAlqama,Shanfara, Labid, ºAntara, Al-A ºsha, and Dhu al-Rumna (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Uni-versity Press, 1989), esp. the poem “To the Encampments of Mayya,” 67–76.


With a red thornberry tooth-twig,Fragrant as musk and Indian ambergris

brought in in the morning,she reveals

Petals of a camomilecooled by the night

to which the dew has arisen at eveningfrom Rama oasis.53

Sells comments on this section:

In passages like that cited above, the beloved is evoked so powerfully that thereader or hearer is convinced that she has been described. But in fact the similes,so vivid in their imagery, tell us very little about the factual appearance of thebeloved. They seem to be depicting the beloved, but in fact what they actuallyshow (camomile blossoms, moringa trees, lush vegetation, flowing water, and inother examples, wild animals giving birth or nursing in tranquility) is the sym-bolic analogue of the beloved: a lost garden. What occurs here is less a descrip-tion of Mayya than it is a metamorphosis.54

The poet’s name, the epithet Dhu al-Rumma, literally means “he-with-a-cord-of-a-rope,” and, as Sells in another context remarks, this nicknameis an inversion of one of the beloved’s epithets, dhatu alwanin, “she-with-many-guises.” We have here “the poet-hero attempting to bind themany-guised and constantly changing into a stable and secure world.”55

And it is this immense, boundless, ever-shape-shifting beloved that findsher way into the religious lyrics of one of the greatest Sufi mystical poetsof medieval Islam, Ibn al-ºArabi (1165–1240).

ibn al-ºarabI’s religious transformations of the arabic qaSIdah

Such a literary evocation of absence and “memory of an irretrievable past”through sequential description is translated by the Sufi poet Ibn ºArabi

into a very complex theological discourse about love and the beloved.This discourse affirms the experience of concrete presence (now past) andthe individual identity of the beloved, even as it turns apophatic, drama-tizing the ultimate inability of religious language to finally and fully seizeits referent, the beloved as the divine in the form of the Eternal Feminine.

Again, in Sells’s vivid translation:

53 Taken from Michael Sells’s article “Ibn ºArabi’s ‘Gentle Now, Doves of the Thornberryand Moringa Thicket,’ ” Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ºArabi Society 10 (1991): 2–3.

54 Ibid., 3–4.55 Sells, Desert Traces, 68.


At Rama between White Sands and Hajirthere is a shy-eyed girl in a howdah,

Child beauty who lights the way,like a lamp

for a man who walks the night,

Pearl in a shell of hair as black as jet,

Your mind dives to reach itnever to emerge from the watery deep.

Neck supple, gestures coquettebring to mind a gazelle of the sandy hills

Like the forenoon sunin the constellation Aries

cutting across the cosmic reaches.

When she takes down her veilWhen she shows her face

she veils the morninglight with her shadow.

I called to her between Hima and Rama:

Who is here for a braveheartwho halts at Sal ºin and hopes . . .

Who for a braveheartdrowned in his tears,drunk from the wine

of her open mouth

Who for a braveheartburned by his own sighs,led astray and abandonedin the beauty of the glow between her eyes.56

Or, in another poem by Ibn ºArabi that echoes images from Dhu al-Rumma:

Gentle now,doves of the thornberry and moringa thicket,don’t add to my heart-acheyour sighs. . . .

56 Selection from Michael Sells, Stations of Desire: Love Elegies from Ibn ºArabi and NewPoems (Jerusalem: IBIS, 2000), 131–33.


I echo back, in the evening,in the morning, echo,the longing of a love-sick lover,the moaning of the lost.

In a grove of tamarisksspirits wrestled,bending the limbs down over me,passing me away.57

nizAm, daughter of a sheikh

Though Sells argues that Ibn ºArabi’s love poems are about divine absenceand essentially apophatic,58 it is important to remember that the poems inIbn Arabi’s Diwan, those passionate verses filled with dissembling andvisionary descriptions of a beloved’s body, were originally composed fora very particular girl: as he writes in the original prologue to the collectionhe called Tarjuman al-ashwaq, or “The Interpreter (Translator/Guide) ofArdent Desires,” they were for Nizam, the daughter of a famous Iraniansheikh, Zahir Ibn Rustam, and the niece of “the venerable ancient, thelearned woman of Hijaz,” Fakhr al-Nisaª Bint Rustam, both of whom werestaying for a time in Mecca. Long evenings spent with these two greatsheikhs were filled with the most marvelous conversations and the mostremarkable people, but the most compelling of persons Ibn ºArabi metat that learned home was Nizam, “a figure of pure light.”59 Concrete ref-erences to this “historical” Nizam are spread throughout the lyric love odes(nasib-ghazals), Ibn ºArabi’s transformation of the traditional qasidah ofthe Tarjuman.

In one passage, mention of this “princess from the land of Persia” oc-curs after a litany of longing lovers, including Mayya and Ghaylan of theclassical Arabic qasidah.

. . . and stop a while with meat the ruins, so we may try to weep,

no, so that I can weepat what has become of me.

Passion shoots me without arrows,slays without a spear:

tell me, will you weep with me when I weepbeside her?

57 From Sells, “Ibn ºArabi’s ‘Gentle Now,’ ” 9.58 See above.59 For a detailed account of this meeting and its circumstances, see Henry Corbin, Creative

Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ºArabi, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1981), 136–39.


Help me, help me to weepand tell me again the tale of Hind and Lubna,

Sulayma and Zaynab and ºInan,then tell me of Hajir and Zarud,

give me newsof the pastures of the gazelles

and mourn for mewith the love poems of Qays and Lubna,

with Mayyaand the afflicted

Ghaylan.

Long have I yearned for that tender girl,gifted in prose and verse, with her pulpit,

eloquent, a princessfrom the land of Persia,

from the most shining of cities,Isfahan.

She is the daughter of Iraq,the daughter of my teacher,

and I her opposite, a child from Yemen.O my Lords, have you seen or heard that two things

oppositeare ever made one?

Had you seen us at Rama, passing each other cupsof desire without fingers,

as our passion caused words of sweetness and joyto pass between

us without a tongueyou would have seen a state

where all understandingvanishes:

Yemen and Iraqin close embrace.60

Another reference is embedded within a lyric that contains vivid awsaf oflithe women with dark hair who sway like boughs, whose lips are sweet tothe kiss, with delicate bare arms, swelling breasts that offer choice gifts,“luring ears and souls,” “taking captive the devout and fearing heart”:

60 Translation adapted from Tarjuman XX:10–22, in The Tarjuman al-ashwaq: A Collectionof Mystical Odes by Muhyiªddin ibn al-ºArabi, ed. and trans. Reynold A. Nicholson (London:Theosophical Publishing, 1978), 87.


. . . showing teeth like pearlshealing with tongues moist with spit

one weak and wasted;throwing glances from their eyes that pierce

a heart grown used to wars and long combat.From their breasts

new moons rise that sufferno eclipse

on waxing full,causing tears to flow as if from dark rain clouds,

sighs the sound ofcrushing thunder.

O my two comrades, may my life-blood be the ransomof a slender girl

who bestowed upon me favors and riches:she established

the harmony of union, she isour very principle of harmony:

both Arab and foreigner,she makes the gnostic

forget:when she gazes, she draws

against you long broad swords,her white teeth a dazzling

lightning.61

Another lyric praises Nizam in the context of her home in Mecca:

. . . how should I not love the City of Peace,since there I have a teacher

who is the guide of my religion,my reason, my faith?

It is the homeof a daughter of Persia, subtle

in her gestures, her eyeslanguid: she greets and heals those whom

she kills with herglances.

After beauty and beneficence,she gives

the best gifts.62

61 Adapted from Tarjuman XXIX:9–15, in ibid., 107.62 Adapted from Tarjuman XXXVIII:2–4, in ibid., 122.

Two Lines Long


A final allusion describes this girl as someone who possesses a fearsomesplendor, a beauty that kills:

Truly she is an Arab girl who belongs by birthto the daughters of Persia, yes,

truly, beauty strung for hera row of fine pearl-white teeth,

pure as crystal.63

The first recension of these poems contains a prologue, describing hismeeting with Nizam, and the poems, without commentary. The secondrecension takes out the references to the “human” Nizam and includes anautocommentary that emphasizes the esoteric, transcendental/theologicalmeanings of the poems. The third recension is identical to the second,though it contains extra passages that depict the circumstances surround-ing the writing of the commentary.64 In his later prologues and allegorical/theological/mystical autocommentaries on these love lyrics, Ibn ºArabi

disabuses the reader of any idea that there is some kind of physical lovein these erotic poems or that their original object was ever merely thephysical, particular “Nizam.” Indeed, he comments, their subject is“Nizam” (i.e., Beauty, Artful Arrangement, Perfected Harmony, Fluency,from the Arabic root n/z /m), the Eternal Feminine, the very “Eye of theSun and of Beauty” (ºayn al-Shams waªl-Bahaª), and not a merely humangirl. These poems, he says in his commentary, “allude enigmatically to thevarious kinds of mystical knowledge which are under the veil of an-Nizam,the maiden daughter of our Shaykh.”65 This “slender girl” is the “single,subtle, and essential knowledge of God,”66 as a “daughter of Persia,” sheis, allegorically, a “form of foreign wisdom connected with Moses, Jesus,Abraham, and other foreigners of the same class.”67 He was responding,in these commentaries, to criticisms of fellow sheikhs, particularly, asHenry Corbin remarks, “those of a certain learned moralist of Aleppo,”

63 Adapted from Tarjuman XLII:4–5, in ibid., 127. I have adapted all of the Nicholsontranslations used above. These poems of the Tarjuman not translated in Stations of Desirehave yet to find their Michael Sells. I’ve done my best to make them read better as poems onthe page in English, to better complement other translations in this article.

64 For a detailed genealogy of the various recensions, along with an account of the com-posite contents of the Leiden MS he is working with, see Nicholson, The Tarjuman al-ashwaq,1–9.

65 From commentary on XX, in ibid., 109.66 From commentary on XXIX, in ibid.67 From commentary on XXXVIII, in ibid., 123.


as to the appropriateness of this love and these erotic poems addressed toa young female.68

“niZAm”: the who and the what

But one cannot come away from the Tarjuman, from poems or commen-tary, without a sense of the concrete particularity of the object of thesepoems: she may be Wisdom, Harmony, a transcendental Truth of DivineBeauty, the “what” of love, but she is at the same time a particular humanbeing, the “who” of love whose very particular beauty—of soul and ofbody—awakened in the sheikh-poet experiences of universal significance.I quote sections from the original prologue of the Tarjuman, translated inCorbin’s seminal study of Ibn ºArabi, L’imagination creatrice:

Now this shaikh had a daughter, a lissome young girl who captivated the gazeof all who saw her, whose mere presence was the ornament of our gatheringsand startled all those who contemplated it to the point of stupefaction. Her namewas Nizam [Harmonica] and her surname “Eye of the Sun and of Beauty” [ºaynal-Shams waªl-Bahaª]. . . . The magic of her glance, the grace of her conversa-tion were such an enchantment that when, on occasion, she was prolix, her wordsflowed from the source; when she spoke concisely, she was a marvel of elo-quence; when she expounded an argument, she was clear and transparent. . . .If not for the paltry souls who are ever ready for scandal and predisposed tomalice, I should comment here on the beauties of her body as well as her soul,which was a garden of generosity. . . .

At the time I frequented her, I observed with care the noble endowments thatgraced her person and those additional charms conferred by the society of heraunt and father. And I took her as model for the inspiration of the poems con-tained in the present book, which are love poems, composed in suave, elegantphrases, although I was unable to express so much as part of the emotion whichmy soul experienced and which the company of this young girl awakened inmy heart, or of the generous love I felt, of the memory which her unwaveringfriendship left in my memory, or of the grace of her mind or the modesty of herbearing, since she is the object of my Quest and my hope, the Virgin Most Pure[al-Adhraª al-batul ]. Nevertheless, I succeeded in putting into verse some ofthe thoughts connected with my yearning, as precious gifts and objects which Ihere offer. I let my enamored soul speak clearly, I tried to express the profoundattachment I felt, the profound concern that tormented me in those days nowpast, the regret that still moves me at the memory of that noble society and thatyoung girl.69

68 See Corbin, Creative Imagination, 138, also 321–22. See also Sells, Stations of Desire,34–35, where he refers to a later rewrite of the original prologue.

69 See Corbin, Creative Imagination, 136–37, 321–32. Passage is taken from the Tarjuman,in Nicholson, The Tarjuman al-ashwaq, 10ff. This young Iranian girl is assimilated to the“princess from among the daughters of the Greeks” that he saw one night while circumam-bulating the Ka ºaba, and ultimately Christ (as Wisdom, Divine Sophia). See Corbin, CreativeImagination, 139–45, 322–28.


Ibn ºArabi notes elsewhere, in his Fusus al-hikam (the bezels ofwisdom), that women represent the concrete particular, like the ProphetMuhammad, the “wisdom of singularity,” and so awsaf in Ibn ºArabi’s re-ligious love poetry, addressed to the female beloved, describe the divineepiphanized in concrete particulars, affirming divine particularity anduniversality at one and the same time.70 As Ibn ºArabi himself remarks,in the original preface:

Whatever name I may mention in this work, it is to her that I am alluding.Whatever the house whose elegy I sing, it is of her house that I am thinking.But that is not all. In the verses I have composed for the present book, I nevercease to allude to the divine inspirations (waridat ilahiya), the spiritual visitations(tanazzulat ruhaniya), the correspondences [of our world] with the world of theangelic Intelligences; in this I conformed to my usual manner of thinking insymbols; this because the things of the invisible world attract me more thanthose of actual life, and because this young girl knew perfectly what I wasalluding to [that is, the esoteric sense of my verses].71

The awsaf in Ibn ºArabi’s nasib-ghazals, to use the still-crucial in-sights of Corbin, transfigure the earthly figure of the woman by settingher against a light that brings out her “superhuman virtualities” and soanticipates something that is “still absent” in its totality, the full divinepresence which is “not yet,” though it shimmers in metaphors and similesinspired by the memory of the particular Beloved body.72 The wasf here,as an act of loving beholding, is a “transmutation of the sensible,”73 the“descent of the divine and an assumption of the sensible,”74 what IbnºArabi, in another context refers to, in Corbin’s translation, as a “conde-scendence” (munazala).75 We descend the stairs as Socrates did in his“recantation” speech on love, ideals, and particularity in the Phaedrus.

This is hardly negative theology in a pure sense (if such a thingever exists), but rather it joins a certain via negativa, a vivid sense of anendless yearning and infinite search for the Beloved akin to Gregory of

70 See the last chapter of the Fusus on Muhammad and Ibn ºArabi’s discussion of women,perfume, and prayer. Translation in Ibn al-ºArabi: The Bezels of Wisdom, trans. R. W. J. Austin(New York: Paulist Press, 1980), 272–84. See also a translation from Titus Burckhardt’sFrench edition of the text with notes: Muhyi-d-din Ibn ºArabi, The Wisdom of the Prophets(Fusus al-Hikam), trans. from Arabic to French Titus Burckhardt; trans. from French toEnglish Angela Culme-Seymour (Gloucestershire: Beshara, 1975). I am indebted to ScottKugle for suggesting I take a look at these passages in Ibn ºArabi’s Fusus on women, particu-larly, and the Prophet.

71 From Corbin, Creative Imagination, 138.72 Ibid., 154.73 Ibid., 155.74 Ibid., 155–56.75 Ibid.


Nyssa’s “eternal progression” (epektasis), to a kind of spiritual messianism,a beholding of the transcendental visionary truth of the “not yet” in theobject of love.76 In a nasib addressed to “her” as a male Beloved, IbnºArabi expresses such “infinite insatiability” in simple, stark words:

I am absent, and desiremakes my soul die.

I meet him,but am not cured:

it’s just desire,whether I am absent

or present.

When we meet, something in me stirsthat I could hardly

imagine: the cure’s a second diseaseof passion

because I behold a form whose beauty,as often as we meet,

grows in splendorand majesty:

there is no escape from passionthat grows,

on a predestined scale,with every growth

in loveliness.77

Guises of loveliness beguile. One is so close, then far, then, in much ofour literature, one discovers that the shape-shifting beloved has, all thetime, dwelt in the heart, deep within, or in the gut, the innards, though itstill sends out its bewildering array of images, odors, and sensations:

I am mad with love for Salmawho dwells at Ajyad.

76 See Ibn ºArabi’s Futuhat [Meccan revelations] II:327: “It is certain that the belovedobject is something that does not yet exist and that the love of an already existing object is inno wise possible. The only possibility is the attachment of the lover for a real being in whomthere comes to be manifested the realization of the beloved object that does not yet exist.”Compare II:334: “Many sophisms occur in connection with love. The first of all is one wehave already mentioned: lovers imagine that the beloved object is a real thing, whereas it isa still unreal thing. The aspiration of love is to see this thing realized in a real person, andwhen love sees it realized, it then aspires to the perpetuation of this state, whose realizationin the real person it has previously awaited. Thus the real beloved never ceases to be unreal[i.e., always transcendent], although most lovers are unaware of this, unless they have beeninitiated into the true science of love and its objects.” Quoted in Corbin, Creative Imagina-tion, 334–35.

77 Adapted from Tarjuman LV, in Nicholson, The Tarjuman al-ashwaq, 141–42.


No, I am wrong.

She livesin the black clot

of blood in the membraneof my liver.

Beauty is bewildered by her:odors of musk

and saffrondrift away

on the air.78

love language of excess: the who and the what in the body

Thus we have in Ibn ºArabi’s limb-by-limb descriptions a distinctivecoupling of the particular and the general, with an emphasis on absenceand lack. The wasf here bewilders, confuses, confounds particularity;it loses at times the singular other in guises and disguises. Love here is,indeed, divided, and it “divides the heart,” to return to the phrase used byDerrida.

But it is not only this. In a way certainly different from The Song ofSongs, and less apparent, the wasf in Ibn ºArabi also holds in its semanticregisters the sense of the singular beloved, even if in a purely prolepticsense of something that is yet to (fully) be. “She,” as feminine, like theProphet Muhammad, is the very cipher of particularity, and that fact hauntsthese image-rich poems of longing. As we have seen, in spite of the ex-cessive semantic overflow or surplus of extravagant metaphoric energiesused to describe the beautiful body of the beloved, the concrete particularperson never entirely evaporates or is wholly concealed, at least in thecontext of the Tarjuman as a whole. Though the ancient Arabic qasidahmay emphasize absence and the memory of what is lost, its elaborateawsaf a systematic dissembling and not a literary act of presencing, wehave also seen that the qasidah in the hands of a religious poet like IbnºArabi combines visionary idealization—divine otherness and the “notyet”—with a sense of a “real” object of desire, the “assumption of thesensible”—the lovely scholar-girl in a household of scholars in Meccawho was also Wisdom, Harmony, and, finally, perhaps most strangely,Divine Love in the gut.

We move now to an analogous motif in a religious poet and a religioustradition of medieval South India. This motif in the Sanskrit poetry ofSouth Indian saint-poet Ve“kate¶a combines in a unique way many of the

78 Adapted from Tarjuman LXI:7–9, in ibid., 148.


semantic and syntactic registers, the willed ambiguities, of the wasf in itspraises of a protean, “many-guised,” boundless, though also (yet some-times only potentially) powerfully present divine beloved. But there arealso important differences. These Hindu verses house the most theologi-cally self-conscious and elaborated form of extravagant description wehave yet looked at, and so, in their systematic joining of the “who” andthe “what,” the least ambiguous and most confident vision of the unity ofparticular and ideal forms of love.

iii. anubhava: enjoying the body of god in south asian

literature

There are interesting analogues to the wasf in one of the most widespread,though little-studied, descriptive devices in South Asian literatures, thesequential description of a god or goddess, a hero or heroine, from foot tohead or head to foot (padadike¶ah, apadacudanubhavam, or nakha-¶ikha,literally “toenail-to-topknot” for the Hindu god Krishna).

As with the awsaf, the actual origin of such limb-by-limb descriptionsis far from clear. One obvious textual and perhaps cultic source—alludedto by some poets—may well be the Vedic Purusa sukta (Rg Veda X:90),though some of the earliest literary examples come from Pali descriptionsof the body of the Buddha in the Lakkhanasuttana of the Digha Nikaya(ca. third century BCE), inspired in part by ancient conventional accountsof the thirty-two auspicious marks of the “great” person (mahapurusa).By the third century CE, in the Buddhist stotras or “hymns” of Matrceta,we have fully developed examples of the adaptation of this form ofsequential description to the body of the Buddha.79 By the seventh cen-tury, the Chinese pilgrim I-tsing attests to the fact that two of Matrceta’sstotras, the Catuh¶ataka stotra and the ‡atapañca¶atika stotra, were widelychanted throughout “India.”80

In the Pali Therigatha (lyrics with commentaries and attached bio-graphical narratives collected in fifth-century Kañcipuram), such descrip-tions are used ironically to satirize a love poet’s erotic descriptions of ahuman female beloved. The verses of Bhikkhuni Ambapali, a self-portraitof the nun-heroine from head to foot, are a parody of the erotic love tra-dition. They juxtapose conventional images of the young girl’s hair “glossy

79 For a discussion of Matrceta’s stotras, see Anthony Kennedy Warder’s Indian KavyaLiterature, vol. 2, Origins and Formation of the Classical Kavya (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass,1974), 228–30, 230. And this Buddhist notion of the “great man” (mahapurusa) obviouslyhas its roots both in the royal notion of the cakravartin and in the ancient Vedic tradition ofthe “cosmic person” from whose sacrificed body the cosmos and the social order was created.See Rg Veda X:90 (esp. verses 12–14) for a sequential description of the mahapurusa.

80 This reference is taken from Nancy Nayar’s study of the poetry of the early Acayras:Poetry as Theology, 39.


and black as the down of a bee,” “a casket of perfumes,” her teeth “likethe opening buds of the plantain,” her throat of “mother-of-pearl,” and herarms “shining like twin pillars” with the old woman’s body, “wrinkledand wasted” with years. The language of love is turned on its head andused in the service of a meditation on impermanence.81 Here extravagantsequential description is used precisely against particularity, in a waydifferent from the dissembling motifs of the Arabic qasidah, and in theservice of a transpersonal, general ideal of self and body.82 The ironyis even more savage in the verses attributed to Bhikkhuni Subha of theMango Grove, where the young male lover’s hyperbolic praise of thebeautiful nun’s eyes—compared to “gazelles,” “enshrined” in her faceas in the “calyx of the lotus”—is answered by the nun tearing out her eyein contempt and handing it to the young man.83 “Here then,” she says indisgust, “take your eye!” (handa te cakkhum harassu).84

Other early examples of this form directed not to human lovers, nuns,or holy men but to actual temple icons include Bana’s Candi ‡ataka(ca. seventh century CE), which contains a detailed foot-to-head descrip-tion of the loveliness of the goddess Candi’s body, with a distinctivefocus on the toenails, and a work Winternitz claims as contemporarywith Bana, Muka’s Pañca ‡asti, a praise in five hundred verses of thecharming form of the goddess Kamaksi of Kañcipuram. Also by theseventh century there are analogous Buddhist and Jain Sanskrit stotrasthat describe in elaborate detail the bodies of Buddhas or of the Jinas.85

In later centuries, limb-by-limb descriptions become widespread inpan-Indian cosmopolitan Sanskrit literature (kavya), as well as in various

81 For Ambapali’s verses see Therigatha 252–70 (in Oldenberg and Pischel’s Pali TextSociety edition, The Thera- and Theri-gatha [London, 1883], 147–50). For an English trans-lation, see Rhys Davids, Psalms of the Early Buddhists, I: Psalms of the Sisters (London: PaliText Society, 1909), 120–25. See also K. R. Norman, trans., The Elder’s Verses II: Therigatha(London: Pali Text Society, 1966). For a contemporary translation and running commentary,see Susan Murcott, The First Buddhist Women: Translations and Commentary on the Theri-gatha (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1991), 129–34.

82 The Therigatha material poses some important variations on the theme of ideal bodiesand particularity, but detailed treatment exceeds the scope of this article.

83 Therigatha 366–99, in Oldenberg and Pischel, 158–52.84 Ibid., no. 396. For an English translation and discussion, see Murcott, The First Buddhist

Women, 177–83. See also Kevin Trainor, “In the Eye of the Beholder: Non-Attachment andthe Body in Subha’s Verse (Therigatha 71),” Journal of the American Academy of Religion61, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 57–79.

85 I am indebted to Nancy Nayar for these references. See her Poetry as Theology: The‡rivasmava Stotra in the Age of Ramanuja (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1992), 20, 38:See also M. Winternitz, A History of Indian Literature, trans. Subhadna Jha (Delhi: MotilalBanarsidass, 1963), 2:377. Other important poems include Harsa Vardhana’s suprabhatastotra, a “wake-up” poem for the Buddha (in the style of shrine poems for the deity), and Jainpoet Manatu“ga’s Bhaktamara Stotra and eulogy for the Jina Rsabha (Winternitz, History ofIndian Literature, 2:548; Nayar, Poetry as Theology, 38).


Prakrits and “cosmopolitan” vernaculars, such as Sri Lankan Buddhistkavya literature in Sinhala—developed from Sanskrit models—beginningin the thirteenth century. The important thirteenth-century Sinhala maha-

kavya, the Kavsilumina, contains, for instance, an elaborate foot-to-headdescription of the beauty of Queen Prabhavati, the wife of the Buddhain his birth as King Kusa.86 The Pujavaliya, another thirteenth-centurySinhala kavya, contains long passages describing, limb by limb, thebeautiful bodies of women, along with an emotionally charged descrip-tion of the beautiful body of the Buddha as seen by his lovesick wifeYa¶odhara upon his return to his father’s palace.87 Such Buddhist Sinhalatexts, the exquisite products of a second wave of vernacularzation in SriLanka after the twelfth century, are imbued with a rich atmosphere of re-ligious emotion that is deeply indebted to the aesthetic models of Sanskriterotics.

Such descriptions also play an important role in Agamic and tantricritual texts such as the Pañcaratra, where they form the basis of visual-izations of a deity from foot to head. They also form part of iconometrictexts for ¶ilpins (icon makers) shared by Hindus, Buddhists, and Jainsfrom a very early period. According to South Asian art historian GustavRoth, the iconometric lists drafted by craftsmen in texts such as the sixth-century Citralaksana begin from the top point of the head and proceeddown to the foot, while early Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain religious texts,miming the attitude of the worshipper, move from foot to head.88

Sanskrit kavya poets from the earliest periods marshal a considerablestore of rhetorical figures (alamkaras), such as metaphor (rupaka ordipaka), simile (upama), “fancy” (utpreksa), and alliteration (anuprasa),

86 The mahakavya is based on a Jataka tale (no. 531), as its original title of Kusadavataindicates. See Canto V:224–44 in The Crest-Gem of Poetry: Kavsilumina, trans. W. R.McAlpine and M. B. Ariyapala (Colombo: Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka, 1990). Forone of the few discussions in English of the Kavsilumina, see C. E. Godakumbura’s seminalstudy, Sinhalese Literature (Colombo: Colombo Apothecaries, 1955), 148–52. I am indebtedto Charles Hallisey for drawing my atttention to this remarkable text.

87 See excerpts from Mayurapada Buddhapatra’s Pujavaliya in An Anthology of SinhaleseLiterature up to 1815, ed. C. H. B. Reynolds (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1970), 168–91, esp. 182–83, for a translation of passages describing Ya¶odhara’s ecstatic vision of theBuddha as the hairs on “every part of her body” stiffened with joy.

88 See Gustav Roth, “Notes on the Citralaksana and Other Ancient Indian Works onIconometry,” in South Asian Archaeology 1987: Proceedings of the Ninth InternationalConference of the Association of South Asian Archaeologists in Western Europe, held inthe Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Island of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, pt. 2, ed. MaurizioTaddei and Pierfrancesco Callieri (Rome: Istituto Italiano Per Il Medio Ed Estremo Oriente,1990), 1026. The above discussion is indebted to the discussion of bodily description in myfull-length study of Vedantade¶ika: Steven Hopkins, Singing the Body of God: The Hymns ofVedantade¶ika in Their South Indian Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002),136–37.


to evoke the aesthetic experience of the erotic (¶r“gara rasa) in theirelaborately figured descriptions of beautiful women from head to toe andgods and goddesses from toe to head. For centuries Indian critics havefocused their considerable critical and analytical faculties on the detailedanalysis of such figurative language in poetry, prose, and the dramaand its classification into types. In such poetry—according to one of theearly theorists of Indian poetics, Bhamaha (ca. fourth–fifth or seventhcenturies CE—his dates are uncertain)—hyperbole or “exaggeration”(ati¶ayokti ) is quite acceptable, even inevitable, given a suitable poetic“pretext” (nimitta); it would not, strictly speaking, be seen as “flaunted”at all but, rather, appropriate to the aesthetic enjoyment of the erotic.Moreover, again according to Bhamaha, elaborate figuration (vakrokti ) isone of the defining characteristics of ornamentation in poetry.89

loving description and the devotional eye

From the eighth through the fourteenth centuries in South India, the tropeof exaggerated sequential description is used in distinctive ways first byTamil saint-poets (Aãvars), and later by ‡rivaisnava Acaryas composingin Sanskrit and Tamil, to describe the male bodies of temple images(vigraha, murti, meçi): the various standing, seated, and reclining imagesof the god Vishnu in a growing network of shrines that dot the landscapeof Tamil Nadu. I have already noted that ‡rivaisnava commentators callsuch foot-to-head or head-to-foot descriptions anubhavas: “experiences”or “enjoyments” of the body of the god. Sanskrit and Tamil anubhavas in‡rivaisnava literature are visionary pictures of the deity meant as a toolfor systematic tantric-style visualizations (dhyanani ) but, as devotionalvisions, also as inspirers of emotion, an atmosphere of “divine passion,”a direct experience of amorous feeling through a refined erotic languageinherited from Sanskrit kavya.

Like the awsaf of the Song, the ‡rivaisnava anubhava is a language ofoverflowing joy and one of the most potent vehicles of love language inthe literature. In the rush of images, the concrete object of contemplation,the temple icon, expands before one’s eyes. Like the awsaf of Ibn ºArabi

and the early Arabic odes, the poets’ similes, metaphors, and double en-tendres serve at times to dissolve the original object of gazing—a jeweledbelt, a toe, a thigh, earrings, crown or navel; this, along with mythic andcultic associations from Puranic or Pañcaratra liturgical texts, naturalimagery of earth, atmosphere, and the planets, creates a complex com-posite image of a vigorously protean god, where the starting point of

89 For a detailed account of the history of Indian poetics, see A. K. Warder, Indian KavyaLiterature, vol. 1, Literary Criticism (1972; Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1989). For passagesreferred to here on figures of speech in Bhamaha, see 82–89.


contemplation, the particular limb or particular body form, tends to getobscured, deconstructed in the extravagant textures of the text.90

Yet in spite of their lyrical energies and dissembling metaphors, suchdescriptive texts are decidedly rooted in an individual experience of a par-ticular beloved form of Vishnu, a “cultic” context where one is honoringthe temple body of a deity. They represent perhaps the most elegant bal-ancing act between the “who” and the “what” of love that we have yetencountered. Unlike in the Arabic odes, there is no imagery of absenceor the apophatic here. The saint-poet’s experience—to use a phrase ofRichard Davis, his “devotional eye”—is shaped by sanctum icons, by theirindividual liturgical service and ritual honor (puja), always physically,materially present in the shrine.91 Even when Vishnu is seen to changeform, to move about like a living being, or to be played with like a doll(as in the charming narrative of the Muslim princess who fell in lovewith the plundered temple image of Ra“ganatha), the poets often simplyoscillate in imaginative vision between the immobile standing or recliningstone mulabera and the bronze festival images (utsava murtis) that standbefore them in the “literal” space of the temple sanctum or as booty inthe palace storerooms of a Delhi Sultan.92

Vishnu in this southern Tamil and Sanskrit poetry is the god who oncestood/dwelt “here” and still is “standing/dwelling” (the verb nil—to dwell,abide, stand—as past participle and in the gerundive is used with elasticenergy in the Tamil verses). This beloved god “abides” in the temple andits environs but most vividly “stands/abides” there right in front of theadoring poet, even while he has, simultaneously, become all things. The“what” of this beloved is impossibly immense, beyond metaphor, thoughthe “who” remains present in spite of the full theanthropocosmic form.To the late poet and scholar A. K. Ramanujan the paradigmatic verse thatdescribes this experience, drawing together in dynamic tension the uni-versal and particular object of desire, appears in the work of Nammaãvar,one of the earliest and most treasured of Tamil saint-poets. Nammaãvar’sstanza reads almost like a grammatical paradigm, as Ramanujan notes, “abreathless recital of Tamil pronouns.” In his concise translation:

90 For The Song of Songs, see Soulen, “The Wasfs of the Song of Songs,” 188. See alsoSells, “The Guises of the Ghul.” Sells, as we have seen, argues that the language of theArabic odes expresses a “language of unsaying,” that it has an apophatic or negative sense(i.e., the Beloved disappears in the dissembling of semantic overflow).

91 See Richard Davis, Lives of Indian Images (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,1997), 1.

92 For versions of the story of the icon of Vishnu as Ra“ganatha and the Muslim princess,see Davis, Lives of Indian Images, 132–35. See also Vasudha Narayanan, “Arcavatara: OnEarth as He Is in Heaven,” in Gods of Flesh, Gods of Stone: The Embodiment of the Divinein India, ed. Joanne Punzo Waghorne and Norman Cutler, in association with VasudhaNarayanan (Chambersburg, PA: Anima, 1985), 53–66.


We here and that man, this man,and that other in-between,

and that woman, this womanand that other, whoever,

Those people, and these,and these others in-between,

this thing, that thing,and this other in-between, whichever,

All things dying, these things,those things, those others in-between,

good things, bad things,things that were, that will be,

being all of them,he stands there.93

anubhavas in the theological visions of a south indian saint-poet

The anubhavas of Ve“katanatha or Ve“kate¶a, a fourteenth-century SouthIndian ‡rivaisnava saint-poet also known by his title Vedantade¶ika, “Pre-ceptor of the Vedanta,” take this Tamil paradigm and play with it, toyingendlessly with images of Vishnu’s terrific forms, telescoping all times,past, present and future, myth and narrative history, the universal and theminute particular, layered similes and metaphors and the singular focus,in one complex and extravagant act of beholding. That god who performedso many exploits in so many remote ages, who took on so many differentforms, who is, simultaneously, so many very different things, the “many-guised”: he is also, perhaps above all, out of individual love, here, in theshrine, before the loving gaze of the saint-poet.

This telescoping pattern is vividly expressed in one of Ve“kate¶a’sSanskrit poems that describe the icon-body of Vishnu at ‡rira“gam insensuous, erotically charged detail, from foot to head. Ve“kate¶a’s San-skrit poem was modeled on an early Tamil poem by Tiruppanaãvar, whichalso described this same form of Vishnu from foot to head but withoutsome of the extraordinary splendor of the Sanskrit saint-poet’s images.Verses from that poem read like this:

O Lord of Ra“ga!

I see the exquisite curves of your calves,the lustre of anklets

93 See A. K. Ramanujan, Hymns for the Drowning: Poems for Visnu by Nammaãvar(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 122–23.


bathes themin color;

swift runners between armies in time of war,long ladles to catch the liquid lightof your beauty—

their loveliness doubled by the shadeof your knees:

seeing them,my soul stops runningthe pathsof rebirth.

They seem like firm stems of plantaingrowing in a pleasure garden;

wrapped in the linen cloth,on firein the dazzle of the jeweled belt,

they are pillowsfor his wives,Kamala, Bhumi, Nappiççai:94

Ah! my mind plunges into the mysterious depthsof Ra“ga’s young thighsas into a double streamof beauty.

What can equal it?

It’s so deep that once all worldswere tucked away inside it;

creator of all creators,its lotus flower spews outshining pollen.

In its lustre,a whirlpool of beauty—

this fine navel of the Lord of Ra“gagives endless delight

to my mind.

94 “Napinnai,” or “our Pinnai,” is Vishnu’s Tamil consort. In Tamil mythology she is oneof Krishna’s cowgirl (gopi) lovers.


His broad chest burns with a vermillionof shining jewels; blessed

by the touch of goddess ‡ri’s small feet,its lustre deepened

by the mole with its curl of hair,‡rivatsa:

with its long king’s garland of victory,its shining pearls bright

as the full moon—strewn with the tender leaves

of holy basil—

this cool shadebetween the long arms of the Lord of Ra“gasoothes the fever

of my mind.

Below the tall crown of Ra“ga’s Lord,dappled with a fiery lightof flowers

and jewels,

his dark wavy hair, with its fine garlandsknotted with sweet spices and

fragrant herbs,

is graced by the touchof his wives’ slender fingers,

and wild as the barbed wordsof angry Chola girls—

my mind’s mad wanderingfinds its rest

on that good king’scrown.

So my mind touches the lotus feet of Ra“ga’s Lord,delights in his fine calves, clings

to his twin thighs and,slowly

rising, reachesthe navel.

It stops for a whileon his chest,


then, after climbinghis broad shoulders,

drinks the nectarof his lovely face

before it rests at lastat the crown’s flowery

crest . . .

And after this dizzying itinerary of imagistic description that integratesspecific attributes and iconographic details of the cult images with mythicexploits that go backward in time and an anthropomorphism that evokesthe presence of a living, animated person, a penultimate verse places thereader back into the central temporal and special context of the praisepoem, the temple sanctum itself and the temple icons of a particular godof a particular place that are the immediate focus of the poet’s gaze, andultimately into the very body—into the gut, as Ibn ºArabi would say ofhis beloved—of the poet himself:

The noble beauty of his arms;his body scarred by a warrior’s bowstrings

and women’s bangles—his chest belongs

to Laksmi,goddess of luck.

And the thick clubstudded with iron: his weaponsshow his fearlessness.

He is here, asleep on the coiled serpent,where, just in front of himself,

his very own self, his image,shines. Here,

in the middle of ‡rira“gam town,a king with his three queens—

here, in the middleof my heart!

These verses are from the Bhagavaddhyanasopanam (The ladder ofmeditation on the body of Bhagavan) and describe what for the twentieth-century Sanskrit commentator Ve“katagopaladasa is an experience(anubhava) of an “astonishing otherworldly beauty” (alaukikadbhuta-saundaryam) and of “sweet deep inner delight”; it represents a “contin-uous burning desire” (nirantaraotkatakama), a “ladder of love that has as


its sole object the Lord” (etadapi bhagavavisayakamasya sopanameva).95

This same commentator cites as the source for such sensual relish of thedivine body a passage from one of the finest works of Sanskrit kavya, thelimb-by-limb description of young Parvati in Kalidasa’s Kumarasambhava(1:32–49). The slow journey up the body of god is compared by Ve“ka-te¶a’s commentator to the erotic relish of the young girl and future consortof ‡iva:

At her waist like an altar, curving and slender,there were three gentle folds of the skin,as if a woman in her youth could freshly growsteps for the God of Love to climb.96

Ve“kate¶a, the religious poet, like Kalidasa before him, uses in a cre-ative way motifs from secular erotic literature to express emotions properto love of a deity. Here bhakti, religious love, is continuous with kama,so-called “secular” erotic love—the Sanskrit cousin of eros—and concretehuman emotions and literary conventions of erotic love are harnessed forreligious purposes, with the anubhava as one of their most effective lit-erary vehicles.

There are anubhavas in every major poem by Ve“kate¶a that praise aspecific particularized icon of Vishnu, and in each case these stepwisedescriptions form the core of the long hymn of praise: a head-to-foot orfoot-to-head delectation for the eyes, an extravagant beholding of thebeautiful body of the god.97

the who and the what in “cosmotheandric” unity

I will conclude this section with selected verses from one of Ve“kate¶a’sSanskrit anubhavas to Vishnu, this time in his form as Devanayaka Swamiat Tiruvahindrapuram. This particular form of Vishnu calls forth some ofthe poet’s most passionate and seemingly personal poetry, in all three ofhis working languages, Sanskrit, Tamil, and Maharastri Prakrit. The versesexpress vividly and memorably the language of excess that is the mark ofthe wasf in its most general sense.

95 Verses are from Bhagavaddhyanasopanam 3–6, 9–11. See full translation and detaileddiscussion in Hopkins, Singing the Body of God, 157–65.

96 Kumarasambhavam 1:39. Translation from The Origin of the Young God: Kalidasa’s“Kumarasambhava,” trans. Hank Heifetz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985),27. See also discussion in Hopkins, Singing the Body of God, 161–63.

97 Though traditionally foot-to-head description is reserved for divinities, and head-to-foot for the human beloved, Ve“kate¶a and the other poets in this tradition use both directionsfor Vishnu. Though the exact reasons for this are not clear, some scholars and ‡rivaisnavacommentators claim that in the head-to-foot descriptions the saint-poet assumes intimacy, aspontaneous familiarity with the divine beloved, as if he were human.


Ve“kate¶a uses a variety of dissembling similes and metaphors, from thenatural world, the world of mythic narratives, and that of human bodies.To use the coinage of philosopher and comparative theologian RaimonPanikkar, these anubhavas are “cosmotheandric,” bringing together theworlds of nature, the divine, and the human in elegant balance.98 Moreself-consciously and systematically theological than either the verses inThe Song of Songs or in the nasib-ghazals of Ibn ºArabi, here the divine isdirectly invoked as the many-guised beloved, present in human, natural,and cosmic forms. And also, unlike the inherited tradition of the Arabicqasidahs, there is no imagery of absence here that the poet uses to evokeincommensurability or dissembling metamorphosis. It is here all aboutmanifold, multiple, and simultaneous forms of presence, natural, divine,and human.

In the following poetic description we have natural images in the colddarkness of the night, in stars, a cool moon, the sea, rivers, and the nightsky’s “asylum”; flora and fauna in the bees, peacocks, the lotus, bimba

fruit; the world of sacred narrative and myth in the birth of the god ‡ivafrom Vishnu’s sweat, the exploits of the Love God Kama, Vishnu/Deva-nayaka’s form of the pastoral child-cowherder Krishna, the creation ofthe world from the god Brahma, who emerges from the lotus that growsfrom Vishnu’s navel, the god’s swallowing of the entire universe at itsperiodic dissolution, and his freeing of the cursed wife of a sage, Ahalya,from a stone. Finally, we have the human world, in the fierce and sensualanthropomorphism of the imagery common in the southern Tamil and San-skrit literatures: the god whose body’s perfect beauty draws the envy ofthe jewels that adorn it; his lovemaking with his wife, Laksmi/Padmavati;his scuffed soiled knees as the child Krishna; his sea-creature (Makara)earrings; his curly black hair; the images of a mother’s womb, the youngcowgirls of Braj; the three folds of the god’s belly; and the passionateemotions of the poet’s “devotional eye.”

Roughly, from head to toe, in this religious and visionary art, the godis dissembled but not confused, not evoked in metaphors of absence; the“whole” here is unequivocally present in every “part.”

Seeing your lovely body whose splendoris made even more perfect

by each perfectlimb,

enjoyed by your beloved wiveswith unblinking, astonished

98 See Raimon Panikkar, The Cosmotheadric Experience: Emerging Religious Conscious-ness (New York: Orbis, 1993), esp. “Colligite Fragmenta: For an Integration of Reality,” 1–77.

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eyes, and sought outby the jewels and weapons that adorn it

to increasetheir own radiance,

my sight, O Lord of Gods,is not sated with

seeing! (14). . . . . .O Lord of Gods,a night smeared with stars,

the shining wavesof your dark curly locks of hair

join with the moonof your face

that drips bright nectarof a tender smile:

this is fit object for our meditations

to cool the burningfevers of births

and deaths. (17). . . . . . .That rare mark of auspicious grace—

half-dark,half-bright,

worn by the moonfor only a certain

phaseof it waxing,

shines always on your brow

where, long ago,O Lord of Gods,from the mere drop

of a dropof sweat,

was bornthree-eyed Purusa, Lord ‡iva

who wieldsthe spear. (19). . . . . .On your lovely ear, O Lord of Gods,that shines

in flowing waves of beauty,it takes the form


of the Fishthat marks the banner

of the love god,

enflammer of desires:

Makarika,this jeweled earring,

sweet to beholdby those who stand before you,

plays friskygames,

swimmingagainst

your current. (22). . . . . . .O Lord of those who ride

the aerial cars,

they are eager to play at the protectionof the world,

miming the simple charmsof the lotus flower;

sending streams of blissful perfumes,

they call to us, breathless,with no words,

as from the quietof a mother’s womb:

the glancesfrom the reddened corners of your eye

drench me

with sweetest nectar. (25). . . . . . . . . . .O Lord of immortals,mad with love,my mind kisses your lower lip red as bimba fruit,

as the tender young shootsfrom the coral tree

of paradise:

your lips enjoyed by young cowgirls,by your flute

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and by the princeof conch-shells. (27)

. . . . . . . . .O Lord of Gods,

like your long garland,Vanamalika,

stirred into bright bloom, my mind,radiant with wonder

becomes an ornamentfor your neck

which wears fine tattoosfrom Padmavati’s

lovely bangles

like a conchblueblackas the eye of a peacock’s tail

from the glow of yourdark light. (28)

. . . . . . .Cool and moist,pure luminousdestroyerof darkness,

bright asylum for stars;

dripping sweetnectar for gods,

desire’s passionateyes:

O Lord of Gods,

such a wondrous thing is this mind of yours,that gives birth to moons

in everycreation! (34)

. . . . . . .Though it is so thin,

O Lord of gods,it swallowed

and spat out

this entireuniverse;


its three softfolds

mark nothing less

than the three-folddivision

of worlds;

in its fragrant lotus navela bee

the shape of Viriñca,Lord Brahma,

has its little house:

like a waist band

my mind

adornsyour sweet belly. (35)

. . . . . . . . .They are like surging whirlpools of light

that quiverand play

in a floodtideof beauty

or beloved companionsof Laksmi’s jeweled palace

mirrors;

yet they scuffed and crawledtheir way

through crude cowherder’scourtyards:

these two knees of yourswill not let go

of my mind! (39). . . . . . . .With its touch

the young wife of the forest sageemerged

out of a stone;ashes from a womb

became the handsomeyoung prince;

caressed by Lady Rama

and Mahi,

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goddess Earth,they say

this footis the One God

of all. (41). . . . . .Even this heart of mine—

madly tossedhere

and thereby force of its desire

for everyother thing—

clings toand of its own accord

is heldcaptive,

O Lord of Gods,

by your toes:

flowingdownward

in the liquid lightof their own

rays,

they are petalsof your divine

lotus feet! (42)99

iv. conclusion: love, ideal bodies, and particularity

In a characteristically thoughtful essay on Augustine and Dante on the“ascent of love,” Martha Nussbaum argues that both Christian writersend up rejecting the Platonic Ascent of Love, a doctrine ostensibly basedupon Socrates’ account of eros and the ascent up the ladder of truth in theSymposium. Platonist accounts of love’s ascent claim, as we have alreadynoted, that as one grows in love one moves up the scale of being, fromearthly to heavenly forms of love, from love of the individual person—a

99 From the Devanayakapañca¶at [Fifty verses in praise of Devanayaka], translated infull in my anthology of Ve“kate¶a’s Sanskrit, Tamil, and Prakrit poetry: Steven Hopkins,An Ornament for Jewels: Love Poems for the Lord of Gods by Vedantade¶ika (New York:Oxford University Press, 2007). Stanza numbers in original are noted in brackets at the endof each translated verse.


love vulnerable to pain and attachment, to need and desire—to love ofhis/her qualities, love of beautiful objects or ideas, and finally, beyond,to a great sea of beauty and truth, a transcendental state that strips awayall that is merely human in love.100 Nussbaum points to Augustine’smoments of profound ambivalence on this point in the Confessions andends up claiming that Augustine “advances a picture of ascent (or ascentcombined with descent) that gives a more substantial and more positiverole to certain ingredients of ordinary human love.”101 This valuation ofthe individual and of ordinary human love has more to do with Augustine’scritique of the perfectibility of the body, his awareness of the brokenness(the “horizontality,” as it were) of sin and of moral weakness, along witha vivid sense of the power of memory to draw one back down to the past,than with a pervasive idea about the religious power of human love.

With Dante, however, it is a different matter. Dante’s journey in theCommedia would seem at first glance to be a kind of model of love’sascent. We begin, back in the Vita Nuova, with Dante’s love for Beatricewhen both of them were nine years old, when he first caught sight of herin her red dress. In the process of reading the Commedia, particularly whenwe see Beatrice again in Purgatorio and Paradiso, and feel with Dantethe deep emotion of this reunion after “ten years’ thirst” and the signs ofthe “old flame” (cognoso i segni de l’antica fiamma; Purg. XXX:48), wewitness the steady and sometimes precipitous transformations of Dante’sbeloved girl from Florence: she is Theology, Trinity (the numbers threeand nine), Love, teacher, matronly admonisher, even a kind of figure ofChrist, but for all those extraordinary transformations, and all the incon-ceivable rarefied intensities of her growing physical and spiritual beautyas they ascend, right up to the upper reaches of Paradise, she remains thatsame Beatrice, his irreducible “other.” One can even argue that the bodyof Beatrice, almost in a physical way, beginning in the Vita Nuova, is thevehicle of the entire vision, ultimately forming the very framework of the

100 See Nussbaum’s brilliant essay on the Symposium, “The Speech of Alcibiades: AReading of the Symposium,” 165–99, where she argues that Plato himself, in his constructionof the text, questions the ultimate authority of Socrates’ speech and its neat arrangementof the stages of eros, by including Alcibiades as an all-too-vulnerable foil, desperately andultimately tragically in love with the very particular and irreducible Socrates, at the end ofthe dialogue. To interpret Alcibiades only as a kind of failure or a cautionary tale about theperils of false eros is to ignore important ironies of the text and the central dilemma of loveplaced before the reader by its author, Plato, at the close of this “night of heavy drinking.”

101 See Martha Nussbaum, “Augustine and Dante on the Ascent of Love,” in The Augus-tinian Tradition, ed. Gareth B. Matthews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 63.We have seen this same ambivalence about concrete love of individuals in Ibn ºArabi and hiscritics.

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literary edifice of the Commedia.102 Even in the transcendental vision ofthe Rose at the very end of the journey, the heavenly Rose where all thesaints gather into a unity that seems to swallow all particularity, her gazemeets Dante, in flawless clarity, undimmed by great metaphysical andspiritual distance:

I, without answering, then looked on highand saw that round her now a crown took shapeas she reflected the eternal rays.

No mortal eye, not even one that plungedinto deep seas, would be so distant fromthat region where the highest thunder forms,

as—there—my sight was far from Beatrice;but distance was no hindrance, for her semblancereached me—undimmed by anything between.103

As Nussbaum remarks: “Her particularity transcends all barriers. In thatfull particularity he loves her.”104

The awsaf in The Song of Songs, in Ibn ºArabi’s nasib-ghazals ofNizam’s “absent presence,” and Ve“kate¶a’s anubhavas of the body ofVishnu, though they express different registers of the particular and theideal, and different foci on the spectrum of the divine and the human, dothis same thing for the beloved. Sometimes, like the lovely body of Parvati,daughter of Himalaya and goddess consort of Lord ‡iva, they are called“ladders of love”; we are meant to climb, with the poet, up the body ofgod or of the human beloved, from the foot to the head, and grow in theintensity of our love or our awareness of the “splendor . . . made evenmore perfect by each perfect limb.” The great eleventh-century rabbifrom Champagne, Schelomo Izhaqui, known as Rashi, in his commentaryon the very first verse of the Song speaks about various levels of the “kiss”:there is “kissing of the shoulder, which calls for great exertion, there iskissing of the hand, where God helps; but then there is kissing of themouth, when our prayers are sufficient to yield the desired results throughdivine intervention.”105 But as we have seen, overall, in the wasf and in

102 See the fascinating study by Robert Pogue Harrison The Body of Beatrice (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). It can be argued quite decisively, I believe, thatthe Paradiso in particular can be seen as an ascent of the body of Beatrice, that her body isthe vehicle for Dante’s vertical flight up and into the heavenly spheres.

103 Paradiso XXXI:70–77, from the translation of Alan Mandelbaum ([New York: Bantam,1986], 283).

104 Nussbaum, “Augustine and Dante,” 81.105 See Yerushalmi, The Book of Shir HaShirim, 17. See also Matter, The Voice of My

Beloved, 137.


the anubhava there is really no ladder at all, no one particular directionthat is privileged: we oscillate between the poles of the universal, tran-scendental attributes, love’s beautiful ideas, and, ultimately, the irreducibleindividuality of the singular beloved, whether this is made present in thevery texture of the text, as in the Song and in Ve“kate¶a, or is anticipated,as in Ibn ºArabi’s nasib-qasidahs. Up or down, ascent or descent, it’s allthe same, in that full particularity; we love each limb, its distinctivebeauty, as if it were the whole.106

Here the “who” and the “what” of eros is in creative tension together,at one point dividing and at another healing the heart, but never absorbedinto some “higher” abstract ascendant unity either. At times this literarydevice emphasizes presence, in a surplus of praise, as in The Song of Songsand especially in the theological praise poems of the South Indian saint-poet Ve“kate¶a; at other times, as in the Arabic Odes, there is confusion,the absence (for the time being) of the particular other in a profusion ofimagistic dissemination, an emphasis on eternal progress and the belovedas something, to use the phrase of both Corbin (glossing Ibn ºArabi) andDerrida, “yet to be.” But in all cases a central tension is maintained, akind of willed ambiguity that preserves the particular and the ideal—oreven more precisely, the particular in the ideal—and it is in this senseprecisely that the wasf and anubhava contribute to the study of the litera-ture of love cross-culturally.

In these literary motifs of extravagant description, the irreducible “who”of love remains, particular among its ideal forms. What remains as wellis the standing possibility of conflict, duality, movement, and instability,along with a sense that what these two lovers have yet before them is notan end to the discourse, not a planned ordered telos of love but a “con-tinued pursuit” of better questions. Eros is not a ladder here; it does nottrace a vertical motion but rather creates a kind of charged horizontalspace, an energetic arena of continual risky encounter, a permanent, some-times blissful, sometimes anxious “destinerrance,” where lover and belovedwaver in an endless liquid play of sensations, their bodies mingling withthe landscape around them, then separating into distinct persons, at oncetranspersonal and utterly individual, each to the other, mutually.

Love here, at once human and divine, draws together in one gaze theuniversal in the particular.

Swarthmore College

106 Though it is of course beyond the scope of this article, one can argue that this emphasison beauty and particularity is one of the most compelling ethical dimensions of eros. For anargument about the role of “beauty” (and the particular) in ethics and justice theory, with animplied connection to the eros of beholding the other person, see Elaine Scarry, On Beautyand Being Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).

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Extravagant Beholding